Rabia Chaudry, a Pakistani-American lawyer who wrote a book about the legal saga of Adnan Syed, outlined why she believes the imprisoned Maryland man was wrongly convicted and a victim of ineffective counsel at last week’s American Bar Association Spring 2019 National Legal Malpractice Conference.
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Author, advocate for Adnan Syed discusses celebrated case
Chaudry has become known as the public advocate for Syed, who is at the center of a case that in 2014 became a popular investigative journalism podcast in “Serial: Season One.” Syed remains in jail for the 1999 murder of his teen girlfriend Hae Min Lee after the Maryland Court of Appeals on March 8 denied him a new trial, just two days before a four-part documentary on the alleged wrongful conviction, “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” debuted on HBO.
His case has caught the public’s attention in much the same way as “Making a Murderer,” a Netflix series that raised questions about the 2007 murder conviction of a Wisconsin man, Steven Avery, who previously had been wrongfully convicted in 1985 of sexual assault and attempted murder.
A friend of Syed, Chaudry has advocated on his behalf for many years. Her book, a New York Times bestseller, “Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice after Serial,” was released in 2016. She is also executive producer of the HBO series.
“As a community advocate, I have learned the power of storytelling,” Chaudry said at the ABA conference on April 4. “When you are standing in front of a jury, the best story wins. In Adnan’s case, defense counsel had no story.”
To support her claim of ineffective counsel, Chaudry said Syed “gave his attorney a list of 70 names of people who saw him that evening (at Ramadan services) and who could vouch for him. She never contacted any of them.”
The three-day professionalism conference, sponsored by the ABA Standing Committee on Lawyers’ Professional Liability, concluded Friday in Miami Beach. It included a series of programs on a variety of professionalism issues, including representing mentally impaired lawyers as well as the potential perils of social media use.
Related links:
- About Rabia Chaudry
- The New York Times: ‘The Case Against Adnan Syed’: Finale reveals new DNA test results
- ABA Journal: Top state court reinstates murder conviction of Adnan Syed; his case was chronicled in ‘Serial’ podcast
- “Serial: Season One”
- New York Journal of Books: Review of “Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial”