Chapter 1: What major development occurred in Adnan Syed's case?
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This is a Global Telelink prepaid call from Adnan Sayed. An inmate at a Maryland correctional facility. This call will be recorded and monitored. There is a major development in a case intimately explored in the hit podcast. A stunning reversal. Baltimore State's attorney presenting new evidence of two other possible suspects.
And what this all means is that after decades behind bars, Adnan could be released from prison.
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Chapter 2: How did new evidence lead to Adnan's release?
They just call them the suspect or the suspects because they say the investigation is ongoing. They might have been involved together or separately. They don't know. But both were known to detectives at the time. The first thing and worst thing they list about these possible suspects, those handwritten notes Becky Feldman found in the state's trial boxes.
They appear to be written by a prosecutor memorializing two different phone calls from different people who called the state's attorney's office to give information about the same person. The notes aren't dated, but as best as Becky can tell, the calls came in several months apart and before Adnan was tried.
The gist of the information from both calls is that a guy the state had more or less overlooked had a motive to kill Heyman Lee, that this person was heard saying that he was upset with her and that he would, quote, make her disappear. He would kill her, unquote.
In court yesterday, Becky said the state had looked into this individual and found the information in those handwritten notes to be credible, that the suspect had the, quote, motive, opportunity, and means to commit the crime. Whether he did or he didn't, though, legally speaking, this would be a major breach.
If they failed to turn over evidence like this to the defense, that's known as a Brady violation. And that's what so alarms Becky Feldman. But it looks like Adnan's lawyers never knew about these calls. That alone could be cause to overturn Adnan's conviction. So that's the biggest problem the motion explains.
This Brady violation regarding one of the two alternate suspects the prosecutors are not naming. And the motion says they've also got other new information about these two suspects. One of them had a connection to the location where Heyman Lee's car was found after she disappeared. One or both of them have relevant criminal histories, mostly crimes committed after Adnan's trial.
One of them for a series of sexual assaults. I know who these suspects are. One of them was investigated at the time, submitted to a couple of polygraphs. The other was investigated also, but not with much vigor as far as I can tell. He's now in prison for sexual assault. But no one has charged either of these guys in connection with Heyman Lee's murder. So I'm not going to name them either.
That's all the new information they found about the case. But, the motion continues, they also looked at the old information. And now they're saying they've lost faith in that, too. They don't trust the state's main evidence at trial, the testimony of their star witness, Jay Wilds, and the cell phone records. They don't hold up separately. They don't hold up together.
If you've listened to our show, you probably remember all this. Jay was a friend of Adnan's who told the cops that Adnan said he was going to kill Hay and that after he did it, he showed Jay her body in the trunk of a car and then coerced Jay into helping bury her in a wooded city park. The motion explains, as many people have before, that the details of Jay's story kept changing.
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Chapter 3: What were the reactions to Adnan's release from prison?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
And Jay's story has gotten even more confusing in the years since the trial. The motion notes that Jay told a reporter, not me, back in 2014, that he'd been out in front of his grandmother's house when a nun came by and popped the trunk. At the trial, prosecutors kept saying to the jury, we know he's not the greatest witness.
I do remember that when we first heard his testimony, that we were all skeptical, like, who is this guy and where did he come from?
That's a juror named Lisa Flynn. The prosecutors were telling the jury, don't worry, you don't have to rely on his testimony alone, because what he's saying is corroborated by the cell phone records. Cell phone evidence was crucial to the state's case. It underpinned Jay's testimony about what happened that night, where they went, whom they spoke to. It glued together the timeline.
The cell phone evidence helped clear up the shagginess of Jay's story.
It was after hearing the other testimony and then seeing the records and, like, the cell phone records, um, You know, knowing that, okay, so even if he advised, testimony proved that he was at this place at this time.
But Becky Feldman wrote in last week's motion that the cell phone evidence at trial, it was unreliable. Adnan's defense team has been saying this for years, but the state only recently talked to three experts about what the cell records actually show and don't show. And the experts all agreed you can't use the incoming call records to back up Jay's narrative.
Doesn't work like that for a host of reasons I won't bore you with. We didn't get to the bottom of this incoming call problem back when we were reporting this story. At the end of the motion, Becky Fellman tacked on a, by the way, final section about one of the two main detectives on the case, Bill Ritz.
He was accused of misconduct in another murder case that went to trial the same year Adnan did. In that case, Detective Ritz was accused of manipulating evidence, fabricating evidence, not disclosing exculpatory evidence, not following up on evidence that had pointed to a different suspect. In 2016, the guy convicted in that case was exonerated.
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