Adnan Syed, a convicted killer at the center of the first season of the podcast “Serial”, is scheduled to appear in court Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016 as his attorneys argue for a new trial.
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McClain conceded to ABC that she could only testify to what she remembered, and was not able to say definitively whether Syed was guilty of murder.
In testimonies last week, McClain again claimed she saw Syed in the library and spoke to him on January 13, 1999, the date that prosecutors said Syed killed his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee.
“I would just personally apologize that I didn’t come forward in 2010”, she said, of when the defense lawyer reached out to her to testify.
Maryland prosecutors are asking a Baltimore judge not to grant a new trial for the man convicted in a murder case re-examined by the popular “Serial” podcast.
Adnan Syed was convicted in the 1999 murder of his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, who was found strangled in a Baltimore park.
Brown said cell tower data linking Syed to Lee’s burial site was misleading because prosecutors presented it without a cover sheet warning that the information about incoming calls was unreliable.
But in the end, the prosecutor said, Syed wasn’t convicted because of ineffective counsel or faulty evidence, but because “he did it”. His defense says new evidence could prove his innocense.
“Justice does not bend to the fastionable position of the moment”, he told Welch, noting the “extraordinary attention” drawn to Syed’s case by “Serial”. “Whatever her personal motives, we forgive her, but we hope she will not use Hae’s name in public, which hurts us when we hear it from her. She did not know Hae, and because of Adnan she never will”. He said he felt “the hearing went well for us” and “we accomplished the things we wanted to accomplish”.
Defense attorney Justin Brown urged Judge Martin Welch to order a new trial, arguing: “We proved our case”. The evidence was widely disseminated on the Internet, “so people were investigating this case all over the country”, he said.
He called Chapman a “charming witness”, but said Gutierrez and her team must have seen something flawed.
The hearing, usually a routine step in which attorneys rely primarily on transcripts, became a trial in itself, with attorneys entering numerous documents and affidavits, and expert witnesses debating legal strategy and the reliability of phone records. “Her health was failing, her family was in turmoil … her business, it was becoming unwound. I had thousands of investigators working for me, and that produced information we otherwise would not have had, and that helped us get to where we are right now”, he added. And that Gutierrez probably decided that McClain was too risky as an alibi witness.
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Vignarajah said the hearing was “an opportunity for the system to restore faith in the system”.
