A man held for more than 20 years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend had his conviction overturned thanks to the hit podcast “Serial”.
By VD with AFP
© CHARLOTTE PLANTIVE / AFP
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After the charges were dropped, an appeals court on Tuesday restored the conviction of an American who spent 23 years in prison for a murder of which he claims to be innocent, a case at the heart of the worldwide hit podcast Serial. Adnan Syed, sentenced to life imprisonment in 2000 for the murder of his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee in Baltimore, on the east coast of the United States, was released on bail in September 2022.
The Baltimore prosecutor then explained that she had doubts about the verdict having established his guilt since the discovery of “two alternative suspects”, and finally dropped all charges against Mr. Syed a month later. But an appeals court in the state of Maryland ruled that a procedural flaw had occurred and that the rights of the victim’s brother, Young Lee, who lives in California, had not been respected. According to this court, he would not have had the time necessary to attend the hearing in person.
A podcast must go viral
As a result, the court of appeal overturned the court’s decision to drop the charges against Mr Syed, thereby restoring “his original conviction and sentence”. The court ordered a new hearing to allow Mr. Lee to be present and demanded that “evidence supporting the request to drop the charges be presented”, according to a court document.
The parties have 60 days to respond to this decision. Police arrested Adnan Syed after finding the body of 18-year-old Hae Min Lee half-buried in a Baltimore woods in February 1999. He was sentenced to life in prison a year later.
According to the prosecution, he had not supported that she left him for another and had strangled her. He has always proclaimed his innocence, claiming to be the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice. In 2014, a team of journalists conducted a counter-investigation, told in twelve episodes in the first season of “Serial”. A precursor to the era of podcasts, this radio soap opera has, according to its producers, been downloaded more than 300 million times. It also inspired an HBO documentary.
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