Alibi testimony could have been key in Maryland 'Serial' case: witness
By Donna Owens
BALTIMORE (Reuters) - Lawyers seeking a new trial for a man they say was wrongly convicted of murder in a case made famous by the popular "Serial" podcast argued on Friday that his original defense attorney failed him by not contacting an alibi witness.
Adnan Syed, 35, is serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, 18. Syed's lawyers want a retrial based on new evidence amid questions about the fairness of the case that were raised by the podcast in late 2014.
David Irwin, a defense attorney and legal expert, testified in Baltimore City Circuit Court that alibi witness Asia McClain Chapman "would have changed the ballgame’s result” in the Syed case.
Irwin, a witness for Syed, said that it was standard practice to have an investigator try to contact a potential alibi witness who can place a defendant someplace other than the scene of the crime.
McClain Chapman, a high school classmate of Syed's, testified this week that he was calm when she chatted with him for about 20 minutes at a library the day Lee went missing.
McClain Chapman said no one contacted her to provide a possible alibi at his trial. Irwin called her “powerfully credible.”
Another defense witness, investigator Sean Gordon, testified that of about 41 potential alibi witnesses, only four had been contacted by Syed's original defense team before his trial.
Syed's lawyers have argued before Judge Martin Welch that the verdict was unfair, based on inadequate legal counsel, cell phone records and other issues.
Cristina Gutierrez, the lawyer who led Syed's defense team at his trial, was in private practice and died in 2004.
In testimony for the prosecution, FBI Special Agent Chad Fitzgerald said he believed that previous analysis of cell phone tower records was accurate in placing Syed at Baltimore's Leakin Park. Lee's body was found there in February 2000.
A communications forensic expert, Gerald Grant, testified on Thursday that jurors should have been told that AT&T cellphone records used to place Syed at the site were flawed.
The three-day hearing had been scheduled to end on Friday, but Welch extended it to Monday for more testimony.
The "Serial" podcast produced by Chicago public radio station WBEZ has been downloaded tens of millions of times.
(Editing by Ian Simpson and Tom Brown)
