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Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial is a 416-page biography written by Rabia Chaudry, a childhood friend of Adnan Syed, the titular subject of the aforementioned biography. Adnan Syed was arrested on February 28 of 1999, and charged with the first-degree murder of his girlfriend Hae Min Lee; however, the trial has quickly declared a mistrial as the Jury overheard a sidebar dispute between Adnan Syed’s hired Defense Attorney and the judge. Following the issue, a new trial was established, and Adnan Syed was found guilty and charged with murder in the first degree, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and robbery on February 25 of 2000, and was sentenced to life in prison.
Adnan Syed appealed his conviction several times, maintaining his stance of innocence through the entire thing; his first appeal was in 2003, which was unsuccessful. Later, he made another based on an ineffective and incompetent council in 2010 and was initially denied in 2014. Adnan Syed’s appeals were eventually accepted on February 6 of 2015, from where the Maryland Court of Special Appeals remanded the case to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City on May 18 of 2015. On November 6 of 2015, Judge Martin Welch ordered the re-opening of Adnan Syed’s post-conviction relief proceedings. These proceedings, though originally only scheduled to last for two days, lasted five, from February 3 to February 9 of 2016, and was attended by people from all over the United States; and though Judge Welch granted a new trial, they denied Adnan Syed bail in the meantime, However, the Maryland Court of Appeals, on March 8 of 2019, with a 4 to 3 vote, reversed the lower court’s ruling, and denied the new trial, arguing that though Adnan’s counsel was deficient, it would not have been enough to sway the Jury effectively.
During this time, Adnan Syed’s story became internationally known through use of becoming the subject of the first season of the Podcast Serial, hosted by Sarah Koenig, which called into question the validity of the guilty verdict, and the fairness of the trial, though ultimately ended the subject with Sarah Koenig claiming that even she didn’t know if Adnan Syed was guilty or not, much to the dismay of Rabia Chaundry, who hoped it would maintain support of Adnan Syed’s innocence. Following the podcast’s end in 2014, there were discussions beginning to pop up regarding the lack of use of DNA evidence in the trial, on how Maryland prosecutors tested multiple items tied to the murder but refused to utilize any DNA from Adnan Syed, claiming that the prosecution inherently and intentionally knew it would expose the case as scapegoating; the prosecution denied the claim. Adnan’s story continued to be told, as Investigation Discovery aired a full hour-long special called Adnan Syed: Innocent or Guilty? On June 14 of 2016. Other instances include the biography Confessions of a Serial Alibi written by Asia McClain Chapman on June 7 of 2016, the biography Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial written by Rabia Chaundry on August 9 of 2016, and even in May of 2018, where HBO announced a four-hour documentary based on the case, which revealed that Adnan Syed even refused a plea bargain which would have required him to serve four years before release.
Though it has yet to be proven, many of the supporters of Adnan Syed believed that prosecutors and police were blinded in their investigation by Adnan Syed’s Muslim heritage and that since there has been no evidence of Adnan Syed being violent or abusive, they police and Prosecutors had to rely on stereotypes and harsh generalizations of his religion, arguing that he had the potential to commit the crime just because he was Muslim. Police and prosecution deny these claims. Another instance commonly brought up is the series of knocks and tapping done from police during the testimony of Jay Wilds, one of the witnesses, and crucial to the prosecution’s case. The tapping and knocking was heard whenever Jay Wilds began to have issues remembering what had happened, and the series of taps seemingly reminding him. It is accused by attorney Susan Simpson that the tapping was evidence of the police feeding Jaw Wilds with evidence of his story and what to say, even going so far as to change his story just after the proceedings. This was later proved in a 2019 statement, where Jaw Wilds claimed his statement of seeing the body of Hae Min Lee at Best Buy came purely from the police.
Adnan’s story was a tumultuous one, constantly going back and forth in a way that the court system should be ashamed of; Prosecution and Police struggling to find reason for Adnan Syed’s guilt, while simultaneously struggling to deny any way for the hired Defense to prove his innocence. Despite all of this, at the end of the day, the Jury had reached their verdict, and trust must be placed in that decision.
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