BALTIMORE (AP) A Maryland prosecutor on Thursday sought to poke holes in the testimony of an alibi witness who says she chatted with a convicted killer at a library about the time prosecutors say his high school girlfriend was killed in a case that was profiled on the “Serial” podcast.
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Syed was convicted of the murder in February 2000 and sentenced to life plus 30 years.
The reboot will consist of (at least) three episodes featuring new evidence that could lead to the now-36-year-old’s freedom.
The first half of the day was spent establishing that Cristina Gutierrez, Adnan’s lawyer during his initial trial, had been declining physically, mentally and professionally. Fittingly, season one of Serial, which brought Syed’s case to worldwide attention, is back, too: Sarah Koenig is attending the hearings and offering a series of short updates about what goes down each day in court.
This week’s trial in Baltimore is just a hearing, not a new trial.
Prosecutor Thiru Vignarajah pressed McClain Chapman about her recollections and focused on letters she wrote Syed after his arrest. The defense contends that her account was wrongly ignored by Syed’s original defense team and was misrepresented at a 2012 hearing in which he was denied a new trial.
Syed’s attorneys are asking for a new trial on the grounds that his counsel was ineffective by failing to contact Chapman. It calls her “the true victim”, and says the family looks forward to closing this chapter so her memory can be celebrated “instead of celebrating the man who killed her”.
Koenig always viewed McClain as the “key” to Syed’s case so to see her “stride into the courtroom” in all her “striking” and “beautiful” glory was a big moment. On Tuesday, McClain finally took the stand in Syed’s defense for the first time.
The AT&T engineer who testified in the original trial was not aware that outgoing phone calls were reliable but incoming calls were not, he said.
Asia McClain Chapman, a high school classmate of Adnan Syed, who is serving a life term for the murder and is seeking a retrial, said she spoke with him at a library for about 20 minutes and told him that his ex-girlfriend had disappeared. She said she was never contacted to provide a possible alibi at his trial.
Asia on why she was testifying: “I felt for justice to be served we should put all the information on the table”.
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But prior to jumping back into Mr. Syed’s case, the team did release the newest episode of season two, which is available as of this morning. “Kind of a last-ditch effort”, Koenig writes, employing the uniquely casual style that first endeared her to listeners. Advancements in technology regarding cell phone tower tracking, which played a large part in Syed’s 2000 trail, is also cited in the post-conviction grant.
