I have not read the decision, but for the court to say that the lawyer’s failure did not prejudice Syed at the trial, the court should have to find that no reasonable juror could have been swayed if the lawyer had done his job right and produced the alibi witness. That’s a very heavy lift.
This seems wrong to me. Based on the evidence I don’t think he should have ever been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” and I tend to think he was probably innocent. But regardless, on the adequate representation issue, his lawyer was hiding cancer and in the midst of a big mental demise, and never reached out to an alibi witness who to this day (on the podcast) insists that she was with him when the murder supposedly occurred. Just put it all together and give the man a new trial. You shouldn’t spend your life locked up for a murder that can’t be proven against you just because you “waived” the argument or whatever technical shit.
I wasn’t convinced of his innocence but it was very clear that his lawyer wasn’t functioning well.
The Maryland Court of Appeals provides yet another illustration of the distinction between law and justice in this the best of all possible nations.
Unfortunately, the American justice system prioritizes the rights of prosecutors and police not to have to say “we made a mistake” over the rights of an innocent person to have to spend the rest of their life in prison.
I forget the name of the case but Scalia’s opinion summed up well a deep conservative thread. That is a court or juries decision in a fair trial is correct, and final. Actual guilt or innocence has nothing to do with it. When it serves their purpose then courts are simply a process and justice is served by following process. The result right or wrong is justice.
I am totally agnostic on this case and know nothing about it. It appears to be a question of if the case was fairly presented. This question is almost always decided by the wealth and class of the defendant.
… The court says Syed waived his ineffective counsel claim.
Do you know why the court said he waived his ineffective counsel claim? By claiming ineffective counsel? #confused
Probably by raising it too late. Time cut-offs are common outs for courts that don’t want to re-examine what happened.
I’ve seen this mentality, it’s the same “metrics are more important than actual crime reduction” seen in the War on (Some) Drugs.
In my career (software) they are the people for whom the process is more important than actually getting anything done.
The attitude applies in Judicial and Law Enforcement wrt the WoSD destroys lives.
Applied in other environments it creates bureaucracy.
In all cases I have an intensely visceral response to it. 
I know nothing about the facts or process in this particular case. In general, the most common source of waiver on appeal is that the issue was not properly raised in the Motion for New Trial when originally challenging the judgment/conviction in the trial court.
I don’t recall the ins-and-outs and a good friend’s bro is friends with her and thinks different but as a non-legal person I’m not a fan of Judge Sharon Keller wrt her handling of the Michael Richard death penalty appeal case.
The US Supreme Court has made granting claims post conviction much more difficult through procedural cutoffs that are intended to relieve courts of ever considering claims on the merits if they are made “too late.”. The balance has shifted from discovering the truth to ensuring finality of judgments. That’s not a terrible rule in all circumstances, but the weight has gone too far towards finality over factual innocence, much less reasonable doubt. In the end, it’s another way that the death penalty and attendant problems on appeals and post conviction motions and the related delay have skewed the justice system away from actual justice.
I found the Serial podcast incredibly compelling . . . until I found out all the evidence of guilt they left out. The podcast was not so much a review of the case as it was a defense brief. It made for great theater, and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as one knows its limitations. After the compelling case presented in the series, it was incredibly disappointing to find out not only that a ton of the overwhelming evidence of his guilt was left out, but that there was no real disclaimer regarding that fact at all.
The reality, from the witness statements and trial transcripts and exhibits, is pretty damning. Adnan repeatedly contradicted himself, repeatedly denied knowing matters that he obviously knew, and was repeatedly implicated by witness after witness.
And let’s not forget the long history of Hae being afraid of Adnan, and his threatening conduct and words. Heck, if he were a Republican congressman instead the subject of an NPR podcast, everyone would have been calling for his head instead of a new trial. Let’s not forget the victim here — her own words in writing, and her own statements to others, were incredibly powerful and damning against Adnan.
Now, throw in the dodgy circumstances surrounding the supposed alibi statements, and it really does begin to make sense why the Court would be unmoved. The statement really does look like a drop in the bucket against an ocean of evidence of guilt.
Plus, the alleged alibi witness has credibility issues — it is entirely possible and just as reasonable to suggest that not presenting that witness was a deliberate decision by the attorney based on not wanting to have her blown apart on the stand as it is to claim ineffective counsel. But that wouldn’t fit the narrative, and it’s convenient and easy to blame the dead lawyer.
This whole thing actually reminds me of the Grrenwald/Snowden affairs — a claim of enormous injustice is made, spurring a cottage industry of outrage, but the reality turns out to be that the initial claim left out a whole lot of caveats, conditions, and/or outright contradictions which severely undermine the initial claims.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the default position of many people is to assume a person convicted by a court of law likely got railroaded. On the flip side, a lot of people in the criminal justice system aren’t doing the situation any favors when they rigidly insist that they must have gotten it right. Their “head in the sand” approach just encourages people to doubt the system (which we can statistically prove is not working fairly).
They want to be able to pretend that the system “works” by refusing or denying any and all appeals and claims of wrongful imprisonment. If the courts aren’t shown to be delivering bad verdicts, then everything must be hunky dory, right? It makes me think of an old married couple, who both know the infidelity is there, but they both carefully maintain the facade that everything is fine and it will stay that way, so long as neither starts asking questions of the other.
As @nycabj noted above, we need to have a real way to review cases that permit people with legitimate problems to appeal without cluttering dockets with frivolous filings of people just hoping to get a lucky reversal. Like the married couple, it doesn’t work in the long run to continue to try to pretend that the “love” is still there when it’s been dead and buried for a long time. We need to be able to step back and look at it critically and acknowledge when things aren’t working correctly and work to fix them rather than just insist that nothing needs changing because we are afraid to admit we might have made a mistake somewhere along the way.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to this case specifically, but it’s clearly an issue overall.
Thank you for this.
I would encourage anyone whose knowledge of the case comes only from Serial to look further into the case before drawing any conclusions. Wrongful convictions are a huge problem - Adnan Syed simply isn’t an example of one.
ETA: I do believe his sentence was excessive though. Life in prison without parole for an 18 year old is cruel and unusual punishment. Hopefully the attention his case has gotten can at least rectify that portion of things.
I agree in principal with your reasonable approach. In this case, however, if one reviews the actual testimony and exhibits, free and apart form how they were presented (and not presented) on the podcast, one could not help but come to the conclusion that Adan’s appeals fall into the “frivolous”’ category. Not only was there ZERO actual exculpatory evidence (the closest there ever was were a couple of self-serving claims by Adnan and his father that “maybe”’ he was doing x instead of y), but there was a MOUNTAIN of evidence against him. Witness after witness. Statement after statement. His friends, fellow students, teachers, people who didn’t even know him — all of it damning against him, and none of it explained by him. Same with the records — all of it against him, and none of it explained by him.
Other than the fact that Adnan can put on a good face (voice) for the podcast, it is unfathomable why they choose this as a supposed case of an unjust verdict, because the evidence of guilt was extraordinary. Just imagine being Hae’s family, who lose their daughter to a vicious murder, yet after seeing all this overwhelming evidence of guilt result in a conviction, now they have to relive the whole thing over and over, with millions of people claiming their daughter’s killer is innocent based on the flimsiest of premises. Kind of despicable.
Just like it reminds me of the blind supporters of Snowden/Greenwald, it also reminds me of the blind supporters in the Ferguson, MO shooting. All of that outrage, all of that destruction, all based On what turned out to be demonstrable, proven lies told by “eyewitnesses.” Not that there isn’t racism and major issues in law enforcement — of course there are. But in one’s haste to support the cause, one must be careful to be guided by the facts and not just the cause itself.
The Case Against Adnan Syed will be a four-part doc series on HBO beginning Sunday. I’m looking forward to watching as I have not heard of this case until now.
@somedumbguy FYI
Thanks @littlegirlblue.
I’ve kept half an eye out on the case for quite a while now so I was aware that was coming out. My understanding is that Adnan’s aunt (Rabia Chaudry) is heavily involved though and she’s the one who initially fed Sarah Koenig the heavily redacted, distorted, and selective case files and info that led to Serial’s version of the story in the first place.
I’m hopeful it will be good but I fear it will just be Serial pt. II with all the good and bad that entails.
That’s my understanding as well — that this is not actually going to be “the case against Adnan” from the trial or the investigation as any kind of rebuttal or counterpoint to the podcast, but once again is essentially the case as characterized by his family. Basically just “Serial — The TV Movie.”’ After they pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes (admittedly including me, as I noted above) with Serial, I will be viewing this new series with great skepticism. Hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it. I think this will be the same misleading series with an even more misleading title.
Because the actual “case against Adnan” is overwhelming.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information but you are very wrong about this case.
The witness is very credible and, as they say, can bring the receipts. The lawyer is a sad story, she was apparently great at one time, but she was a mess and fucked up other cases around this time too. In fact she’s pretty much personally responsible for the death penalty getting reinstated in Puerto Rico.
The travesty though is that the state not only contorted evidence, they coerced and threatened a witness who was in other trouble legally into spinning a series of fantastic and inconsistent stories where he and his friend were apparently teleporting and time traveling around Baltimore, smoking weed and burying bodies and still makin’ it to the mosque on time. (It was Ramadan, and Sayed actual gave a reading or something that night.)
It’s really infuriating how Hae’s disappearance was considered no big deal by the police until a body was found. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to piece together who was where and exactly when - the investigators weren’t interviewing people the next day, it was weeks later, and it’s kind of hard to remember details of an unremarkable day weeks or months later. It wasn’t like on TV where they get all the pictures and DNA samples from the crime scene, either. Lots was overlooked. Even so, the physical evidence is not compatible with the state’s weird timeline, which should have been easily refuted by Chistina Gutierrez in the trial, were she anywhere near the lawyer she should have been.
And the friend, the police were feeding him information and trying to get him to work it into a story he was telling to literally save his life. I mean, you can actually hear some of it on tape. Who knows if he knew anything at all (probably not), he was led into telling one small lie and then that was used to force him to tell a larger one, on and on.
After Serial ran there was a group of three lawyers who made some absolutely amazing discoveries about the case. It was one of the first, maybe the first, to rely on cell phone location data to place the accused in the vicinity of the crime. The thing is, the data that was obtained from the phone company was misleading at best; they were billing records, not actual location data. Basically the location for billing purposes doesn’t always match where the phone actually was at the time, just where it had been the previous time it was on the network. The cover page actually had a disclaimer stating the unreliability but - and this is really, really awful - the state did not give that page to the defense with the records. The state’s expert witness who testified in the original trial has since recanted, saying he was misled by the information provided to him. The absolutely incredible Susan Simpson found that information, and lots of other stuff too, having to do with the state’s impossible timeline and the limited physical evidence of when and where the murder took place.
Once Serial ran this case became insanely political. On the one hand, none of this evidence would have ever gotten looked at again if it hadn’t run, but on the other, certain parties really dug in their heels on his guilt because they couldn’t quietly back down and admit there were major fuck-ups.
The saddest part of this is that the actual murderer is almost certainly not Adnan Sayed. There has been no real justice for Hae Min Lee.