Which brings me to my next point. When I was initially arrested, each lawyer I came into contact with stressed vehemently “Do not talk to anyone about your case.” They told me that my phone calls were being recorded, my letters were being screened, etc. And so I didn’t. Some people would write me asking me if I committed the crime, but I never wrote back. And over the years, I would come to find out that a lot of people took that as a sign of guilt. […] Now, don’t get me wrong. My family and Rabia’s family on one side, and the whole world on the other, and they are more than enough support for me … But I think a person may look and wonder how could so many people who knew me come to believe I could commit this crime. And I think my lack of denial/communication played a good-sized part in that.
Krista was someone who was really in my corner. She knew Hae and Stephanie, and was a really amazing friend, both before and after I was arrested. She visited me in Jessup several times, but as the years went by, we fell out of touch. Not in a bad way, but just as life goes on. I have no idea if she still believes I’m innocent or not, but I have a feeling that either way, she wouldn’t mind speaking with you. […]
Sorry for this to be so long. Other than at trial, I’ve never really talked to anyone about these things. I’ve certainly never talked to anyone in-depth about Hae and I. I did not know how it would go over with you. I tried to talk to Justin Brown about it and he immediately cut me off and said that none of that mattered at this stage. […] In my heart, I always wonder if things would’ve turned out differently if the jury had heard me speak about Hae and our relationship/friendship. But I guess that’s just wishful thinking … I will say this, I’m thankful you weren’t all “professional” about it like Justin was. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a really sincere lawyer and a really nice guy. But I really had to work up the nerve to talk to him about how I’m innocent, and I never would’ve harmed Hae. I’m about 3 sentences in when he cut me off, “Adnan, listen. I’m your lawyer. None of that stuff matters at this point. We’re working on your Post-conviction petition. That’s what matters.” So while I appreciated his candor, eventually one day I’m gonna tell him he was a real jerk about it …
I hope you have a good holiday. Take care.
Sincerely,
Adnan Syed
* * *
I was hugely relieved when Adnan agreed to hand the case over to a journalist. And it was an even bigger relief when Sarah, having connected with Adnan and others and reviewed enough documents to hook her, announced she was doing the story. In order to move forward, though, she needed the rest of the documents.
I met Sarah at Adnan’s parents’ house. His mom led us down into the small basement to a closet filled with the kinds of boxes that are synonymous with musty legal files. There must have been close to a dozen of them.
I hadn’t seen these files for almost thirteen years. I first helped the family retrieve them from a storage room where Cristina Gutierrez’s case files were being held for her clients to pick up after she died. I then took the files to my parent’s home and went through them. They had to be delivered to his appellate lawyers, though, and I didn’t have much time.
I spent a couple of weeks, speed-reading and pulling the documents that I wanted to copy for myself, the ones that would eventually make it into the box in my car. I then delivered the full set of files back to Adnan’s family and they passed them on to his lawyer. Over the years these boxes had made the rounds between the lawyers and his home, the last round being at Justin Brown’s office, who had returned them a couple of years prior. Adnan’s family had never gone through them.
Sarah started going through the files, and I stood by with a legal pad handy to note the ones she was going to take. After a while we both gave up and realized she needed too many to keep track. She took a few boxes that day, and then returned to get the rest.
During the first couple of months of her investigation, Sarah and I were in constant communication as I tried to get whatever she needed to her, and introduce her to the community and to people who knew Adnan, like his former attorney Chris Flohr.
* * *
Although it’s hard to know exactly what convinced her that this story would be worth her time, and that there was a potential injustice here, her talk with Chris may have been what cinched it. They met at a restaurant shortly after her initial meeting with Saad and me, and she got right down to business.
She asked Chris what the deal was, was this guy really innocent, because she wasn’t about to waste time on the case otherwise.
Chris reassured her that yes, this was a case that needed to be investigated and that he personally always felt Adnan was innocent. In fact, a few years prior Chris had sent Adnan a letter, his first communication with him since he had stopped representing him in 1999. For all these years he hadn’t stopped thinking about Adnan. He knew that the wrong person had been convicted of this crime. The letter he sent explained a new brain-mapping technology that could determine if a person’s mind had certain memories that could only be stored if they had indeed experienced an event. So if Adnan had nothing to do with Hae’s murder, this technology could prove his brain had no such memories stored.
Adnan had sent me the letter, and after doing some research I learned that the technology was so new, it wasn’t yet recognized by any jurisdiction as evidence. Plus, there was no way Justin would be interested in pursuing something that would distract from his PCR petition, especially something untested.
Adnan had written Chris back to thank him, but we never pursued his suggestion. Still, Adnan was deeply grateful that he still remembered him and made the effort to reach out to an old client.
It was early in 2014 when Sarah told me the great news that This American Life would be committing her and other staff full-time to this story and conducting a full investigation. But I still wondered if I had done the right thing.
The problem was that I didn’t know if an episode of This American Life was going to be able to make a dent in the case itself—it would go by like a blip, barely registering on the Baltimore legal system.
So my hope was not that her final product, the story itself, would prompt a public outcry or movement for Adnan’s exoneration. My hope instead was that once she had gone through the documents, understood the weakness of the evidence and conviction, and met Adnan, she would be a reporter on a quest to find the smoking gun that would prove Adnan was innocent. I wanted to use her investigative skills, and her skills at getting people to talk, to uncover evidence that could get us a new appeal. What her story looked like at the end didn’t concern me so much. It was the investigation that mattered.
But my concern remained about This American Life, even as an investigative tool. In a weird way, being such a big, national outlet with no local ties could prove to be its Achilles heel when it came to this case. So I asked her if she would be willing to work with a local reporter. She didn’t respond immediately but a month or two later teamed up with Justin George of the Baltimore Sun to do some of the local work.
Before that, though, she had a breakthrough. But it was not early enough to save the appeal. The judge had made his ruling.
Sarah got the news before I did, but she didn’t share it with me even though we were communicating almost daily. I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of weeks and wondered what was going on. I dismissed it, thinking it was the holidays, but later she would tell me she didn’t want to talk to me until I found out.
The post-conviction appeal was denied on December 30, 2013. When Justin e-mailed me the news, I was devastated, even though I fully expected it.
My eyes stung with the heat of anger and tears as I read the judge’s opinion. The circuit court had dismissed both claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. The judge found that Gutierrez’s failure to ask the State for a plea deal for her seventeen-year-old client did not rise to the level of incompetence, and that there was no guarantee the State would have offered a plea or that Adnan would have taken one, despite the f
act that he had taken and passed a polygraph stating he would have.
As far as the court was concerned, Gutierrez didn’t fumble the ball on Asia; rather she had “several reasonable strategic grounds” for not pursuing her as an alibi witness. Most interestingly, the court found that Asia’s letters “did not clearly show [her] potential to provide a reliable alibi.” That the court pointedly noted that Asia’s only statements were through her letters is an indication that her in-person testimony may have changed the judge’s mind.
But then there was the very strange assertion by the judge that Adnan himself contradicted Asia’s statements. He noted that Adnan testified he never left the school campus until after track practice, whereas Asia saw him in the public library. Except (1) Adnan never testified to any such thing and (2) even if he had, the library was for all intents and purposes on the school campus.
Reading the opinion made me feel like the judge heard very little of what actually happened in his courtroom. I was bitterly upset. Didn’t a man’s life mean enough for the court to at least get right what he had testified to?
But I knew much of this was about Urick’s testimony. Any judge who believed that a witness gave written statements under duress by the defendant or his family and friends would likely discount those statements completely. And any judge who heard this from the mouth of a prosecutor, under oath, would believe every word.
In the face of this denial, Justin did the only thing he could. He filed what’s called an Application for Leave to Appeal or an ALA. Essentially this application is an appeal to the higher court, the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland, requesting one more shot at the same post-conviction claims raised earlier. In Maryland, it is granted in only 1.2 percent of cases.
While he filed the ALA, he also notified Adnan that this would probably be the end of his representation. The Court of Special Appeals would summarily deny the ALA and it would be game over. There was nowhere else to take this case.
I dreaded the inevitable call from Adnan.
What do you say?
“I’m so sorry, the one chance you had after waiting for more than a decade is now gone. Sorry that it’s all over.”
I didn’t say anything, I just cried. Adnan’s response to my teary, mumbled, snotty outpouring was to reassure me, as always.
“It’s ok, it’s ok. It’s from Allah. He’s the only Judge that counts. We’ll appeal this. It’s not the end.”
That was the moment I knew it all came down to Sarah. Sarah had to deliver or Adnan would die in prison. The first glimmer of hope that she would came when I got a slightly dazed and dumbfounded call from her.
“Rabia. I spoke to Asia.”
* * *
After numerous attempts to get a hold of Asia—who seemed as unreachable and mythic as a unicorn—Sarah finally got the call she’d been waiting for in mid-January of 2014.
Asia was timid at first, unsure about what Sarah wanted, why this case was coming back to interrupt her life, why there wasn’t closure on it after all these years. Asia explained to Sarah why she didn’t respond to Adnan’s attorney’s repeated attempts to solicit her for the appeal. As far as she knew and was concerned, a court of law had found Adnan guilty of first-degree murder. She believed in the justice system and didn’t think such a conviction could stand without solid proof tying him to the murder. And now, all these years later, having never heard from Adnan after her letters in 1999, this murderer—or at least his lawyer—had found her home all the way across the country, where she lived with her children.
She freaked out, plain and simple, she told Sarah. And then she called the State’s Attorney’s office. How and why they connected her to Urick, a former and not current prosecutor, is unclear. Nonetheless, Urick assured her that Adnan had been convicted on irrefutable evidence and that he was now trying to game the system for a new trial.
The rub was this: Asia told Sarah that she still remembered seeing Adnan at the library after school, around 2:30 p.m., on January 13, 1999. She remembered their conversation, including his telling her that he and Hae had broken up but he still cared for her and wished her the best. She recalled her boyfriend and his friend coming to the library to pick her up, hours late to her chagrin, and her boyfriend’s irritation that she had been chatting with a good-looking guy when he arrived.
Asia remembered the storm that night that left her stranded at her boyfriend’s house, and that school was closed for the days following. She recalled the letters she wrote to Adnan after his arrest and that she’d concluded that there must be a reason he never responded.
Sarah called me, elated, but much to her surprise, news of her talk with Asia brought us little joy. My first reaction was tears. Not just tears of sorrow but of rage. Adnan knew, his family knew, I knew that Asia had never been pressured by anyone to write anything. I was glad that Sarah now knew that we didn’t make Asia say any of it, because she clearly still stood by it.
We couldn’t understand why Urick testified that Asia had told him she’d been pressured to offer her documents. Did Asia tell him that? Sarah didn’t ask Asia about it either—she didn’t want to scare her off. Sarah wanted to let her talk, give it time, and then circle back about that. She didn’t know then that she would not get to speak to Asia again for a very long time.
It didn’t really matter now. The timing of this conversation, of Asia’s affirmation to Sarah of what we knew was the truth, was the final blow, the deepest cut. If it had happened a month earlier, perhaps it could have altered the course of the appeal. But now, having lost the PCR just weeks earlier, it was too late.
* * *
Sarah continued her investigation and was now routinely speaking with Adnan a few times a week. She also met with him numerous times.
I felt a certain amount of stress over their meetings and conversations, maybe from overthinking things.
I had no idea, and no way to ask without seeming ridiculous, whether Sarah personally knew any Muslims. After what happened at the bail hearing and trial, I worried: would she be able to approach our community with total objectivity? Like any human being, she might process it all through her own biases, biases that could be primed after 9/11. And while Sarah could get to know Adnan’s family, Saad, and me on a human level because we could communicate with her freely and hang out with her in our homes, her access to Adnan would be controlled.
It would be through timed, awkward phone calls, or meetings across a table, divided by a half-pane of glass, surrounded by guards, bound to the stiff seats, psychologically restrained if not physically. She would see a large, hulking, built-out man with a long beard, skullcap, rolled-up prison-issue jeans, and DOC-printed sweatshirt; a man severely limited in his ability to show her who he fully was as a human being, looking instead like the archetypical prison Muslim.
She would not see the lanky kid who had been locked up in 1999, and her investigation would always be through this filter. Such concerns may seem overly sensitive, but having spent the last decade working on fighting negative perceptions of Muslims and the bigoted policies those perceptions end up producing, my fear was real. It is the fear any Muslim who visibly looks Muslim has—that we are immediately judged by others based on our appearance.
And then there was Adnan, who had never spoken to a journalist before. Who never had to answer questions about his innocence because those of us in touch with him never asked him. We knew he was innocent.
With a journalist, however, it needed to be said. Everything needed to be said. I wondered what it would be like for him to open up for the first time, to be challenged, to tell his story to a stranger, many parts of which he never told the rest of us. Remember that rule about looking the other way, not prying? It was simply not culturally acceptable even between us, between Adnan and his family or me, for him to share the intimate details of his relationship with Hae, his feelings about her disappearance and death, and to a certain extent even his private life as an inmate.
Every so often I’d a
sk Adnan how it was going with Sarah. What was their relationship like? Did she like him? Did he feel comfortable? His response would always be, “Alhamdulillah, everything is fine.”
I would try to reassure him—and myself—that she was on “our side,” that she wouldn’t put this much time and effort into this story if she didn’t think he was innocent. I wouldn’t know until later that her discussions with Adnan showed that she wasn’t ever fully convinced of his innocence.
Guilt or innocence aside, fairly early on I realized that we weren’t actually on the “same side.” I had misunderstood our relationship, and I had no one to blame but myself. Call me naïve, but one day I finally got it.
Sarah contacted me in May to tell me she’d be in the area and asked if she could swing by. With her would be one of her colleagues; they planned on doing the ride between the school and Best Buy to see if they could complete it within twenty-one minutes—the time between when school let out at 2:15 p.m. and the “come and get me call” from Adnan to Jay, according to the State.
I was excited. This exercise would debunk one of the most ridiculous aspects of the State’s narrative: that in this short span of time, while accounting for being able to get out of a school lot crowded with buses and student cars, Adnan could somehow get into Hae’s car, get her down the road to Best Buy, strangle her, move her to the trunk in the light of day in a public parking lot, then trot around the lot to make a call from a pay phone at 2:36 p.m. And I would be there when Sarah tried it and saw that it just couldn’t work.
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