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I doubt we will see Adnan Syed on trial again. It’s hard to imagine that time — 23 years since a jury found him guilty of Hae Min Lee’s murder — has strengthened the case against him.
It’s hard to imagine a prosecutor cobbling together the original evidence needed for a conviction.
甚至很难想象，即将离任的，联邦起诉的巴尔的摩州律师似乎渴望撤离赛义德的信念，将在不到一个月的时间内转身，并宣布将再次受到审判。
And so the question of Syed’s guilt will hang in the gloaming, with the jury of public opinion split between those who believe the prosecution had a solid case against him and those who became convinced of his innocence — or flawed conviction — from the Serial podcast.
如果您的头在上周左右的事件中有所旋转 - 巴尔的摩州的检察官玛丽莲·莫斯比（Marilyn Mosby）突然问赛义德（Syed）的信念被撤离，几天后，法官同意，在法院台阶上为赛义德（Syed）欢呼 - 您并不孤单。
For years, the state has stood by Syed’s conviction, fighting off all kinds of appeals. Now we’re told that the state long ago had evidence of two other possible suspects and that Syed’s defense was never told of their existence. That, Mosby argued, was a denial of Syed’s due process rights.
But Brian Frosh, the Maryland Attorney General, says Mosby is wrong. At several stages, he says, the defense was given access to investigative files, and therefore the state did not violate what’s known as the Brady rule. (The name comes from a Maryland murder case that ended up in the Supreme Court in 1963. The court ruled that prosecutors must turn over any exculpatory evidence to the defense; withholding it violates a defendant’s due process rights.)
如果您想知道莫斯比（Mosby）和弗罗什（Frosh）在莫斯比（Mosby）和弗罗什（Frosh）之间会相信什么，我会补充说：为马里兰州服务的州而言，很少有人表现出比布莱恩·弗罗什（Brian Frosh）更具正直性。赛义德（Syed）坐在监狱中，他不太可能有意站在监狱中，不公平地尝试和定罪。
But getting back to the head-spinning of the past week, it’s important to note the timing: Mosby made public the request to vacate Syed’s conviction just as her federal trial, now delayed, had been scheduled to start. Two days later, a hearing was scheduled in Baltimore Circuit Court, and that hearing occurred three days later, on Monday. The victim’s family was given short notice, and Lee’s brother, who lives in California, had to have his say via Zoom.
The state’s request that the conviction be vacated could have come at any time — and at any time would have caused a sensation. Why was it filed when Mosby was due in federal court if not to pull public attention away from her embarrassing legal problems?
What gets me is the haste, and the deference shown to Syed. The state spent several months looking at his case and became convinced his trial had been unfair. Good. But how do you claim a Brady violation, a serious matter, without questioning the original prosecutor or appellate attorneys?
如果我听起来持怀疑态度，那就是报道了许多人似乎没有人关心的情况，那些声称无罪的囚犯等待了几个月和几年才能引起人们的注意，而且大多数人从来没有这样做。我有一系列来自囚犯的来信，他们声称他们是错误的定罪。我写了几篇有关被指控犯有谋杀案的人的专栏文章，例如赛义德（Syed），他们在年轻人中接受审判，并在被定罪之前服役了数十年。在一个案例中，也许是太阳读者熟悉的，即使在反对他的主要证人后，一个叫马克·法利·格兰特（Mark Farley Grant）的人也无法被推翻。
想象一下。
Imagine the key witness against Syed, his alleged accomplice Jay Wilds, coming into court and telling a judge he had lied during the trial. That could have fully and finally exonerated Syed, right?
But imagine the judge refusing to believe Wilds and refusing to overturn Syed’s conviction. I know: It’s almost impossible to imagine such a thing, but that’s exactly what happened to Mark Grant.
Grant had been convicted of the 1983 murder of Michael Gough, a West Baltimore teenager.
格兰特（Grant）在被捕时是14岁，当时他开始判处无期徒刑时15岁。
That prosecution witnesses, including the original suspect, had lied under oath, that the defense was never told that one of them had failed a lie-detector test or that another had confirmed Grant’s alibi, was not discovered until University of Maryland law students, under the direction of Renee Hutchins, now dean of the school, dug into Grant’s case. That was in 2008.
Grant was finally paroled in 2012 at age 42.
A few years later, Hutchins went to court to have Grant declared innocent.
“Newly discovered evidence reveals that pervasive witness intimidation … prevented the jury from hearing [two witnesses] testify that Mark Grant did not shoot Michael Gough,” Hutchins argued. “This new evidence of innocence undermines all confidence in the verdict against Mark Farley Grant.”
没关系。
赛义德被释放的同一巡回法院的法官拒绝接受撤回的证词。因此，格兰特从未被免除。自从他释放以来，他就一直受雇，但由于他的不法定罪，他从未获得过任何赔偿 - 更不用说道歉。如果他是一个有趣的播客的主题，也许情况会有所不同。