Sarah Koenig Reacts To Adnan Syed’s New Trial

Adnan Syed, the subject of the podcast Serial, was granted another trial on Thursday. Judge Martin Welch announced that the attorney in Syed's 2000 trail, during which he was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, "failed to cross-examine the state's expert regarding the reliability of cell tower location evidence." Serial followed Syed's case and exposed possible errors in the court's decision. Its host, Sarah Koenig, wrote on Serial's website that the announcement came as a surprise. After all, Syed had first requested to be relieved of his conviction back in 2010, and the petition was denied in 2013. "Last week, when I saw the news that Judge Martin P. Welch granted Adnan a new trial, I happened to be on Skype with our Executive Producer Julie Snyder, and both of us did exactly the same involuntary thing of sucking in our breath and then putting our hands over our mouths," she wrote. "We weren’t so much shocked because of the legal arguments, but because it was such a long shot, this outcome." Koenig explained that it was the podcast Undisclosed that first brought to light the unreliability of the cell phone expert's testimony in the original trial. "Adnan struck this familiar jailhouse posture: ‘If only someone would take another look,'" she wrote. "And in a 58-page opinion released June 30, boy oh boy did Judge Welch take another look." Syed has been serving a life sentence in prison in Western Maryland. He pleaded innocent during his original trail according to The Baltimore Sun, and now he'll have another chance to convince the judge that he is.