Round up the usual suspects
Last week, when I republished a 2015 essay about why I am convinced Serial's Adnan Syed is guilty, I promised to follow up with a look at the motion to vacate his conviction. Here it is
In a surprising plot twist, Baltimore prosecutors – yes, you read that right, prosecutors – have succeeded in getting America’s favourite girlfriend killer released from prison. Now they need someone else to blame for the murder of Hae Min Lee and they’re rounding up the usual suspects
Adnan Syed, the podcast hero who me-too types swoon over, has had his conviction for the 1999 murder of his girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, wiped from the books. While a newly filed motion to vacate Syed’s conviction contains only the tiniest bits of new information, Baltimore prosecutors had their hearts set on giving Syed, who first came to attention in the groundbreaking podcast Serial, a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Why the State’s attorneys would do this is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they really do believe that Syed’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice or that, guilty or not, almost 24 years in prison for a crime committed by a 17-year-old is enough. More cynically, they might think that overturning a high-profile, disputed conviction will be a political win for their team and a career booster for the individuals involved.
The new motion, filed by State prosecutors two weeks ago in Baltimore court, neither proves nor disproves anything about this much discussed case. Buried in its 21 pages of noise, hearsay and obfuscation are a few new facts of limited importance. DNA was tested but the results led nowhere. An inadmissible polygraph test was, according to one expert, improperly administered. Cellphone evidence of the type that has been used at thousands of trials was, according to yet another singular expert, for some reason unacceptable in the case of Adnan Syed.
What’s hailed as the bombshell revelation of the State’s motion, however, is its claim to having developed two suspects who may have acted alone or together. While these suspects go unnamed in the motion, anyone familiar with the details of this case can easily identify them. Suspect Number One, as I will call him, is Alonzo Sellers, known as Mr. S the streaker in Serial. Suspect Number Two, as I will call him, is Bilal Ahmed, a Baltimore dentist convicted of sexual assault, who is now in prison. Ahmed’s name was mentioned only once in passing on Serial.
Suspect Number One: Mr. S
Let’s start with Mr. S, who found the body of Hae Min Lee in very unusual circumstances and was treated, at the time of the murder in 1999, as a suspect by the police. Even after the cops cleared Sellers, Syed’s lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, continued to investigate him. “She did a lot of research in hopes of linking Mr. S to the crime, or at least trying to link him to Jay,” Sarah Koenig reported on Serial. “Did he patronize the video store where Jay worked for instance, but she never succeeded.”
Nor did Koenig succeed, when she attempted to link Mr. S to the murder, 15 years later:
I tried every which way to figure out if he knew, or anyone in his family knew Adnan, or Jay, or any of the people Jay had told about the murder. And vice versa. Whether any of them had ever heard of Mr. S. I found no connections. The closest I got was, bear with me, I found out that Mr. S’s sister-in-law was a math teacher at Woodlawn back in 1999 when all this happened. So I called her. Hae was her student, she said. An excellent student. Top of the line. But she didn’t think Mr. S knew anything about the crime before he found the body. She put her husband on the phone, Mr. S’s younger half-brother. And he said, “You know what’s crazy? I used to live next door to the kid that did it!”
Now, seven years post-Serial, State prosecutors reveal in their motion that they have discovered what eluded the cops, Syed’s defence team and Serial – the supposedly startling fact that one of Mr. S’s relatives lived near the space where Lee’s car was found. Any investigator will tell you, however, that such two-degrees-of-separation coincidences – just like Mr. S’s half-brother and Adnan Syed being neighbours – are a dime a dozen. Hell, I live in Canada and after I wrote about Serial, an old friend let me know that his ex-wife used to be good friends with Gutierrez’s brother.
The car connection to Mr. S is as good as meaningless.
Suspect Number 2: Bilal Ahmed
So what about Bilal Ahmed then? Suspect Number Two is a dentist currently serving out a 16.5 year prison term for sexually assaulting five former dental patients and one former employee, and improperly touching another former employee. The victims, all males, were attacked in separate incidents between 2010 and 2014.
Ahmed, a young married father and dentistry student at the time of Lee’s murder, was a youth leader at the Syed family’s mosque. His relationship with Adnan was so close that he was the first person Syed called after his arrest. Ahmed also signed the papers for Syed’s cellphone, acquired two days before Lee’s murder. He testified for several days before the Grand Jury that indicted Syed, but he was not called as a witness at the trial, most likely due to the fact that, in October 1999, he was arrested for a sex offence involving a 14-year-old boy. The jury would not have liked such a witness, whether he was testifying for the defence or the prosecution.
It is clear that it is Ahmed who is being referenced in the following paragraphs from the State’s motion:
The State located a document in the State's trial file, which provided details about one of the suspects. A person provided information to the State that one of the suspects had a motive to kill the victim, and that suspect had threatened to kill the victim in the presence of another individual. The suspect said that “he would make her [Ms. Lee] disappear. He would kill her.”
The State also located a separate document in the State's trial file, in which a different person relayed information that can be viewed as a motive for that same suspect to harm the victim
According to the State, this information, which it says could have changed the course of the trial, was improperly withheld from the defence in what is known as a Brady violation. While this should not have happened, it is important to note just how paper thin this new information is. It is not even clear that the person who reported the suspect to police is actually the same person who heard the threat.
What’s more, even if Syed’s lawyer had no knowledge of this supposed threat from Ahmed, she knew all too well that police were interested in Ahmed’s role in the Lee murder as she acted as Ahmed’s lawyer at the Grand Jury hearings. Ahmed was also the one who later suggested Syed hire her. The State tried to get Gutierrez barred from representing Syed, arguing it was a conflict of interest, but she fought back and won. Ahmed signed an affidavit swearing he was okay with all this.
Given Ahmed’s history of sexual predation and assault and his close involvement with Syed, it is not difficult to come up with a range of reasons he might be hostile to Hae Min Lee. The less malignant explanation would be that she was causing his protege to stray from the mosque. The more malignant would be that Ahmed was jealous.
Of course, if the State truly believed that Ahmed murdered Hae Min Lee, the obvious person for its investigators to talk to would be Adnan Syed. Yet funnily enough, neither Syed nor any of the many lawyers and advocates who have worked on his behalf have ever advanced the idea of Ahmed as suspect even while they have pointed the finger at and smeared many of the other people inadvertently involved in this case.
How, it might be asked, did all these Syed advocates manage to miss Ahmed, the serial sexual predator, who is now one of the State’s two prime suspects? The answer is they always knew he was a person of interest and simply chose not to talk about him, because raising the question of Ahmed and what role, if any, he might have played in Lee’s murder is not good for Syed and could well lead to places his advocates don’t want to go.
That’s why you should expect continued silence on the subject of Bilal Ahmed. Rounding up the usual suspects, as the State has done in its motion, is a time honoured tactic used to bide time while everything blows over, as it almost certainly will for Adnan Syed and Bilal Ahmed.
I left a comment at Colin Miller's blog and he will not post it.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2022/09/at-the-hearing-on-the-joint-motion-to-vacate-adnan-syeds-murder-conviction-becky-feldman-from-the-baltimore-city-states-atto.html
It was a comment that implicated Bilal with the caveat that just because Bilal may be the murderer it doesn't necessarily follow that Adnan was complicit or had any knowledge of it.
Why would Colin not post my comment, I wonder? It underscores your observation I quoted above. They had no problem implicating everyone under the sun to include Mr. S and Jay and Don for all these years but now suddenly we're not allowed to implicate Bilal? Curious, that.
It certainly doesn't seem to be in the interest of Justice For Hae Min Lee. Up to this point they bragged about how the online community has helped so much over the years to free Adnan and part of that help was implicating people like Don and Jay in order to create reasonable doubt and yet now that Adnan's sentence is vacated, we can no longer mention suspects?
This stinks Colin and you are applying double standards which makes you a hypocrite. There are no good guys and perhaps this is why justice is so often mangled.
"How, it might be asked, did all these Syed advocates manage to miss Ahmed, the serial sexual predator, who is now one of the State’s two prime suspects? The answer is they always knew he was a person of interest and simply chose not to talk about him, because raising the question of Ahmed and what role, if any, he might have played in Lee’s murder is not good for Syed and could well lead to places his advocates don’t want to go."
This is an excellent observation and point. The State's case against Adnan was a fiction, but it doesn't preclude Ahmed from being the murderer. It's wrong that Adnan's fan club never did consider Ahmed as the murderer. Clearly this isn't in the interest of justice for Hae and instead is to protect Adnan, truth be damned.
In profiling the murderer, where Hae's body was discarded is crucial and telling and also what was done to Hae.
We know she was strangled and that was the cause of death. Was she strangled with someone's hands or with a device? Was she raped? I have never gotten an answer to this. If she wasn't raped, this precludes some of the serial rapists who were active at the time who have been mentioned as possible suspects. Roy Davis, for example.
If she wasn't raped, this further points to Ahmed as the possible murderer. Ahmed had a predilection for males so if he was jealous and murdered Hae because of that or murdered Hae for hurting Adnan by breaking up with him, he wouldn't have raped her.
Of course, that leaves Leakin Park. Would Ahmed have been familiar with Leakin Park? I don't know. Leakin Park is important because I believe this is one of the things that precludes Don. Don, I believe, would not have used Leakin Park. I believe Don would have gone further out to a rural area to discard Hae's body, not further towards the city.