Serial host Sarah Koenig says vacation of Adnan Syed’s conviction is ‘deja vu’ for defence

‘I felt almost disoriented for about a day. Like the city prosecutor’s office suddenly pulled off a rubber mask and underneath was a scowling defense attorney,’ says the podcast host

Serial host Sarah Koenig has said that the vacation of Adnan Syed’s conviction is “deja vu" for the defence who have argued there were flaws in the case for years.

Ms Koenig told the New York Times that many of the arguments made by the prosecution calling for Mr Syed’s release are “the same” as those already made by his legal team, during his decades-long fight to prove his innocence in the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee.

“A lot of what the state is saying in this motion probably feels like déjà vu for the defense side,” she said.

“Many of the arguments are the same — unreliable witness statements, unreliable cellphone evidence. A timeline of the crime that doesn’t hold up.”

Ms Koenig, who propelled the case to global attention through her podcast series, said that the “bombshell” new revelation came from the details that the state had failed to hand over information about another potential suspect back during the original case.

“But there are a couple of new things, too,” she said.

“The main is the revelation that the state didn’t hand over information about a possible alternate suspect in the crime. That was a bit of a bombshell.”

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced last Wednesday that her office was asking a judge to overturn Mr Syed’s conviction and release him from prison, citing multiple issues with the original case including information about two potential alternate suspects.

The suspects, who were not named because of the ongoing investigation, were both known to the initial 1999 murder investigation and were not properly ruled out.

According to prosecutors, one of the suspects had threatened to kill Lee around the time of her murder, saying that “he would make [Lee] disappear. He would kill her”.

Lee’s car was also found directly behind the house of one of the suspect’s family members, prosecutors said.

One of the suspects was ruled out of the case by police based on faulty polygraph tests and both have relevant criminal records – with one convicted of attacking a woman in her car and the other convicted of serial rape and sexual assault.

Adnan Syed leaves the courthouse on Monday after his conviction was quashed (2022)

Ms Mosby revealed that the original prosecutors on the case had failed to hand over the information to Mr Syed’s legal team – something that is a clear Brady violation.

In a new episode of Serial released on Tuesday morning, Ms Koenig revealed that the information about the alternate suspects came to light after a prosecutor stumbled across two handwritten notes naming one of the individuals earlier this year.

The “messy” notes, which were found deep within boxes of files on the case, revealed that two different people had placed two separate phone calls alerting prosecutors to the unnamed suspect prior to Mr Syed’s 2000 conviction.

Despite the tipoffs, the notes were not shared with Mr Syed’s legal team and instead sat gathering dust in boxes inside the state attorney’s office for the past 23 years – all the while Mr Syed was holed up behind bars for a crime he says he didn’t commit.

Speaking to the New York Times on Tuesday – one day after Mr Syed walked out of the court a free man for the first time in more than two decades – Ms Koenig said that she “did not see it coming at all” when prosecutors made the bombshell announcement that they were calling for Mr Syed’s release.

After following the case for close to a decade – and seeing multiple legal setbacks for Mr Syed along the way – she admitted she was “shocked” when the state suddenly “pulled off a rubber mask and underneath was a scowling defense attorney”.

“I was shocked. I did not see this coming at all. One of the first things I did was call Adnan’s brother and then his mother — they told me they didn’t know either,” she said.

Sarah Koenig poses with her award at the 74th Annual Peabody Awards ceremony on 31 May 2015 in New York City (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Peabody Awards)

“The prosecutors who filed the motion to release him kept it pretty tight, it seems.

“But the shocking part was that this was coming from the state’s side. I felt almost disoriented for about a day. Like the city prosecutor’s office suddenly pulled off a rubber mask and underneath was a scowling defense attorney.”

Ms Koenig said that the case still seems to be missing “some smoking-gun evidence” about who killed Lee back on 13 January 1999.

But, what is clear is that the “story” used to convict Mr Syed “wasn’t accurate”, she said – which was what she said she wanted to draw attention to in Serial.

Ms Koenig launched the podcast back in 2014, after being contacted by Mr Syed’s family friend and attorney Rabia Chaudry.

The podcast series propelled the case to international attention and raised serious doubts about Mr Syed’s conviction.

As one of the pioneers of the true crime phenomenon, the podcast divided opinion around Mr Syed’s innocence or guilt.

“We knew people would come to different conclusions, of course,” said Ms Koenig.

“Barring some smoking-gun evidence, which we didn’t find (and it seems like no one else has either), there was no way for us to say definitively what happened.

“But what we were pointing out in our story was that the timeline of the case and the evidence in the case had serious problems. Which meant the people who convicted Adnan of murder, they didn’t know what happened either.”

She added: “And so this kid goes to prison for life at 18, based on a story that wasn’t accurate. That’s what we wanted people to think about: Even setting aside the question of Adnan’s guilt or innocence, are we OK with a system that operates like that?”

Hae Min Lee in her yearbook photo before her 1999 murder (Serial )

Ms Koenig went on to list off the various systemic issues which played out in the 2000 case, which she said are far from unique to Mr Syed’s case.

“Questionable interrogation tactics and tunnel vision by police; an overtaxed system that fails to properly interrogate evidence; prosecutors withholding evidence from the defense; our country’s tolerance for insanely long prison sentences; juveniles treated as adults when science tells us they aren’t; racism; how grindingly difficult it is to get the system to take another look at your case once you’ve been convicted; prosecutors and cops who don’t police themselves and then double down when they’re accused of doing something wrong,” she said.

“It’s pretty much — you name it, this case has it. And while I’m up here: There is nothing unusual about the presence of these systemic problems in Adnan’s case. Nothing.”

So far, prosecutors have stopped short of exonerating Mr Syed, saying their request to overturn his conviction – and the subsequent judge’s ruling – does not mean a declaration of innocence but that “in the interest of fairness and justice, he is entitled to a new trial”.

Under state law, prosecutors now have 30 days to decide whether to drop the charges against Mr Syed or to retry the case.

Ms Mosby said that prosecutors were waiting for the results of DNA testing which they hope could advance the investigation into the 1999 slaying.

Lee, 18, vanished without a trace on 13 January 1999 after leaving Woodlawn High School in Baltimore, Maryland, where she was a senior. Her body was found around one month later buried in a park in Baltimore. She had been strangled.

Mr Syed, her former boyfriend who was 17 at the time, was arrested and charged with her murder.

In 2000, he was convicted of murder, robbery, kidnapping and false imprisonment and sentenced to life in prison.

Mr Syed has always maintained his innocence.