Prosecutors on Tuesday dismissed charges against Adnan Syed in the 1999 murder of Min Lee, a case chronicled in the first season of the hit podcast. Serial.
Emily Vitti, spokeswoman for the city of Baltimore’s state attorney’s office, said in an email that her office has dismissed its case against Syed and will release more details about its decision later Tuesday.
Laura Nerider, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law who was with Syed when he was released from prison last month, earlier tweeted: “Breaking news: After the latest round of DNA testing The results are out, like the previous rounds of testing, Adnan Syed was disqualified, now he is officially exonerated!
A Baltimore judge last month overturned Syed’s murder conviction and ordered his release from prison, where the 41-year-old had spent more than two decades. Circuit Judge Melissa Finn also gave prosecutors 30 days to decide whether to retry Syed or drop the charges.
Finn ruled that the state breached its legal obligation to share evidence that could have bolstered Syed’s defense. After his release, Syed was placed under house arrest with GPS location monitoring.
Syed maintained his innocence for decades and caught the attention of millions in 2014 when he made his debut season. Serial focused on the case and expressed skepticism about some of the evidence, including cell phone tower data.
Prosecutors had previously said that a reinvestigation of the case had revealed evidence of the possible involvement of two alternative suspects. The state’s attorney’s office said the two suspects may be involved individually or together.
One of the suspects threatened Lee that he would “make her (Ms. Lee) disappear. He would kill her,” according to court filings.
Prosecutors said the suspects were known at the time of the original investigation and were not properly rebutted or presented for defense.
Prosecutors also said that new information revealed that one of the suspects was convicted of assaulting a woman in his car, and that another suspect was involved in a series of rapes and sexual assaults. was convicted of being
Prosecutors also noted unreliable cell phone data used during Syed’s trial to confirm his whereabouts on the day of the crime. The notice on the record specifically advises that billing locations for incoming calls “shall not be considered reliable location information.”
Syed served more than 20 years in prison for strangling Lee, then 18. His body was found weeks later buried in a Baltimore park.
After more than a decade, popular Serial The podcast revealed little-known evidence and attracted millions of listeners, breaking podcast streaming and download records.