Via Serial’s Facebook page.

Via Serial’s Facebook page.

Adnan Syed, whose trial for the murder of his ex-girlfriend was at at the center of the hugely popular podcast Serial, is getting another day in court. A Baltimore judge vacated his conviction on the ground that his attorney provided ineffective counsel. Or as his lawyer put it:

Syed, now in his mid-thirties, had been quietly serving out a life sentence after being convicted of Hae Min Lee’s murder in 1999 when Serial host Sarah Koenig came along and chronicled his case.

Syed claimed he’s innocent and that his then-lawyer, who’s now deceased, botched the trial. Is he lying? Is someone else lying? Who really killed Hae Min Lee? Those are the questions that Koenig painfully and obsessively tried to answer during the podcast’s 12-episode run. And much to everyone’s surprise, it was a huge hit—dominating the cultural conversation for months in 2014. Koenig also covered the hearings in which Syed’s attorneys argued for a new trial as an update to the first season of Serial (the second chronicles Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s disappearance).

But according to the Baltimore Sun, it was actually a spin-off podcast that uncovered the piece of evidence (the cover sheet to a fax about the reliability of cell phone tower evidence) that convinced the judge to vacate the conviction.

“The court finds that trial counsel’s performance fell below the standard of reasonable professional judgment when she failed to cross-examine the state’s cell tower expert regarding a disclaimer obtained as part of pre-trial discovery,” Judge Martin Welch wrote.

Filed Under: adnan syed, maryland court of appeals, serial, trial,