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BALTIMORE , Sep 20 (AP) \u2014 The creator of a true-crime podcast that helped free a Maryland man imprisoned for two decades in a murder case said that she feels a mix of emotions over how long it took authorities to act on evidence that\u2019s long been available.<\/p>\n
In a new episode of the \u201cSerial\u201d podcast released Tuesday, a day after Adnan Syed walked out of court following the vacating of his murder conviction, host Sarah Koenig noted that most or all of the evidence cited in prosecutors\u2019 motion to overturn the conviction was available since 1999.<\/p>\n
\u201cYesterday, there was a lot of talk about fairness, but most of what the state put in that motion to vacate, all the actual evidence, was either known or knowable to cops and prosecutors back in 1999,\u201d Koenig said in concluding the new episode. \u201cSo even on a day when the government publicly recognizes its own mistakes, it\u2019s hard to feel cheered about a triumph of fairness. Because we\u2019ve built a system that takes more than 20 years to self-correct. And that\u2019s just this one case.\u201d<\/p>\n
She argued that the case against Syed, which was featured on the first season of \u201cSerial\u201d in 2014, involved \u201cjust about every chronic problem\u201d in the system, including unreliable witness testimony and evidence that was never shared with Syed\u2019s defense team.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Circuit Court Judge Melissa Phinn in Baltimore ordered Syed\u2019s release after overturning his conviction for the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee, Syed\u2019s ex-girlfriend. Syed was 17 at the time of Lee\u2019s slaying and has always maintained his innocence.<\/p>\n
At the behest of prosecutors who had uncovered new evidence, Phinn ordered that Syed\u2019s conviction be vacated as she approved the release of the now-41-year-old.<\/p>\n
Phinn ruled that the state violated its legal obligation to share evidence that could have bolstered Syed\u2019s defense. She ordered Syed to be placed on home detention with GPS location monitoring. The judge also said the state must decide whether to seek a new trial date or dismiss the case within 30 days.<\/p>\n
The Baltimore prosecutor\u2019s office filed a motion last week to vacate Syed\u2019s conviction, a filing that Koenig described as a \u201cfirework\u201d coming from the same office that asked a jury to convict Syed more than two decades ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe prosecutors today are not saying Adnan is innocent. They stopped short of exonerating,\u201d she said. \u201cInstead they\u2019re saying that \u2018back in 1999, we didn\u2019t investigate this case thoroughly enough. We relied on evidence we shouldn\u2019t have and we broke the rules when we prosecuted. This wasn\u2019t an honest conviction.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BALTIMORE , Sep 20 (AP) \u2014 The creator of a true-crime podcast that helped free a Maryland man imprisoned for two decades in a murder case said that she feels a mix of emotions over how long it took authorities to act on evidence that\u2019s long been available. In a new episode of the \u201cSerial\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-200929","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}