Good evening,
and welcome to the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.
My name is Hamsa Srikanth
and I'm one of the two Athenaeum Fellows this year.
First off, I just want to say standing here,
it's so nice to see a full house tonight.
I hope you all continue to come to the Athenaeum
and be a part of experiences like this one.
So when I was 13 years old,
I liked only two things: listening to angsty pop music
and reading murder mystery novels.
Agatha Christie was undoubtedly the queen of crime.
And I loved reading about the dramatic turns,
the accusations that the butler did it
and the wrongful convictions.
I would keep my eyes glued to the pages of the book,
desperately trying to guess the murderer.
Spoiler alert, it was the butler.
(attendees chuckling)
Amidst the theater and the excitement of it all,
it was so easy to forget
that these events could very well happen in the real world
to real people with complex lives,
who suffer the consequences of an interesting plot twist.
In early 2000s, Adnan Syed was convicted
and sentenced to life plus 30 years for the murder
of his ex girlfriend Hae Min Lee,
a high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland.
Syed has maintained his innocence
and his family friend Rabia Chaudry has always believed him.
Rabia Chaudry is an attorney, podcaster
and recent Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow
at the United States Institute of Peace,
where she researched the intersection
of religion and violent extremism.
She's the co-host and co-producer
of the hit criminal justice podcast, Undisclosed,
with nearly 250 million downloads
and the author of The New York Times bestseller,
Adnan's Story.
She's the co-producer and co-host of the weekly podcast,
The 45th, which examines the politics
and policies of the Trump administration.
Prior to work with USIP,
Chaudry served as an international security fellow
at the New America Foundation, where she led
a countering violent extremism community project
in partnership with Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Her work at New America Foundation
focused on the empowerment of American Muslim communities
in social media advocacy.
Chaudry is also the founder of Safe Nation Collaborative,
a training firm that specializes in CVE,
which is Countering Violent Extremism, training.
Chaudry is a fellow
of the Truman National Security Project,
a fellow of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute
and a Fellow at Shalom Hartman Institute.
She's a frequent writer
and public speaker on issues of social and criminal justice,
faith, gender and national security.
She's the recipient of the Truman National Security Projects
2015 Harry S. Truman Award
for Communications and Media influence.
A 2015, Carnegie Corporation Great Immigrant
and the recipient of the 2015 Healing and Hope Award
by the campaign for the first sentencing of youth.
Chaudry received her JD from George Mason School of Law
and practiced immigration and civil rights law
for over a decade before moving into CVE policy sphere.
Miss Chaudry's Athenaeum presentation
is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing
and Public Discourse
and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies both at CMC.
This is a 45-minute presentation,
and there'll be a Q&A at the end.
As always, I must remind you
that audio visual recording is strictly prohibited.
Please use this opportunity to put away your devices,
stuff your face with bread
and adjust your seat if you have not already done so.
And without further delay,
please join me in welcoming our speaker tonight,
Miss Rabia Chaudry. (attendees applause)
Hi and good evening Claremont McKenna.
Thank you for that fantastic introduction.
Sometimes I listen to these
and I think did I do all that really?
I feel really tired listening to that (chuckles).
Well, it's such a pleasure and honor to be here.
I've never been to Claremont McKenna,
or Claremont at all before and it's such a beautiful place.
I'm so glad the rain went away for me.
I got to hike a mountain.
I'm gonna sleep great tonight.
Had a wonderful meal.
Now, before I start my talk tonight,
I want to just mention something
that I've heard in so many talks about how to give a talk
and that's like audiences only remember
the first thing and the last thing you say,
they don't remember anything in the middle.
So I want to start off by saying this,
Adnan Syed is innocent
and Adnan Syed was wrongfully convicted
of a crime he didn't commit.
So having said that, that's the first thing,
you're gonna hear it one more time tonight
before this is over.
I want to ask a couple of questions.
How many people here listen to Serial?
Oh, my lord!
Okay, hands down.
How many people did not listen Serial,
that's a better question?
Okay.
Now, the people who listen to Serial,
how many people listen to Undisclosed?
Ah, this is the kind of room I love.
It means you guys don't even know what you don't know.
That's good, it's good, I have a lot to tell you.
But I'm gonna start by leveling the playing field
so that we're all on the same page,
and we understand what this story is even about.
Now, every wrongful conviction starts with a crime.
Sometimes that crime is murder
and in this story that's what it is.
So I want to talk about January 13, 1999.
And that's the day that Hae Min Lee Lee,
an 18-yeah- old senior at Woodlawn High School
in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland,
went to school that day,
left school, was expected to go to work that evening,
and she disappeared.
What we know about her
is that she left school sometimes 2:00 and 2:15 p.m.
That's what we believe.
A number of students
said they think they saw her leave around that time.
The problem is the police didn't talk to students
or anybody at the school for six weeks
until after she disappeared.
And every day Hae Min picked up her young cousin
from a local elementary school at 3.00 p.m.
But that day, she didn't pick her up.
And that child waited and waited.
By five o'clock, the family realized something is wrong,
because Hae Min Lee
was an incredibly responsible young woman.
She was athletic, she was an academic achiever,
she worked while she went to high school,
and she was just a highly responsible young woman.
She had a pager, they paged her,
they didn't hear anything back and they got worried.
So they call the police, really within a matter of hours.
By around 5:30 that evening the police showed up,
they took a police report and they started looking for her.
Hae had a car.
They couldn't find her car.
They knew that Hae had a boyfriend at the time.
She worked at LensCrafters
and she was dating a man named Don
who also worked at LensCrafters.
So they even put out APBs or whatever,
some police alerts to the area that Don lived in,
thinking maybe she was there.
But they didn't find her.
Now this happened, like I said, on January 13, 1999,
and it just so happened
that there was a snowstorm that night,
and for the next two days, school was closed.
So the kids who went to school with her,
remember, this is not the time of social media.
Nobody's posting on Facebook or Twitter.
Anybody seen Hae Min Lee?
Her parents, her mother and brother
made a couple of calls to some of the friends
and they were like, no, we haven't heard from her
but they also knew this was like a couple of months
before they're gonna graduate
and she might be with her new boyfriend
who she was crazy about and,
kids kind of dip out the last year,
they're not as focused and easy to keep track of
that last couple of months of senior year.
So nobody took it seriously.
Thursday came, Friday came, schools closed,
the weekend came.
It wasn't until Monday and all the kids went back to school
that they were like, where's Hae Min Lee?
They still didn't know where she was.
So for a good four days,
people didn't realize at the school
that she was actually missing,
that her family was still looking for her,
that the police were looking for her.
They didn't realize this.
Hae Min Lee's body was found about six weeks later.
It was found in a park
just a few miles away from the school.
It was buried hastily.
I think it's fair to say her body was dumped.
It was not a ceremonial burial.
She had been strangled.
There was no evidence of a sexual assault at the time
although her clothing was rearranged
in a way to suggest there might have been.
Her car was not there.
Her purse was not there.
Her pager was not there.
It was just her body.
So now the police had to make an arrest.
They had to figure out what happened to her.
Now, Hae Min Lee's body was found on February 9, 1999.
But on February 4, five days before her body was found,
the police had already started looking at a suspect.
And that suspect was Adnan Syed.
Adnan was also a 17-year-old high school senior
and him and Hae Min Lee had dated for six months
the previous year.
They had gone to junior prom the previous year together,
they were like a cute little romantic couple,
they were crazy about each other,
both good-looking, high-achieving,
the toast of the high school and then they broke up.
And he was seeing other people.
She had a new boyfriend, but they started looking Adnan
because at that point,
when it was a missing persons investigation,
the family brought in a special investigator,
a woman who was a local cultural consultant.
And this is not information we knew for about 15 years.
We did not know this person existed in this case.
And this woman wrote a memo in 1999
and which she said as a cultural expert on Muslim culture
because Adnan was an American Muslim boy,
that Muslim men are prone to violence against women,
that this looked like maybe something
that was like an honor killing type of situation.
So there's a 12-page memo all about Muslim culture.
Adnan at one point when they were dating
had given as a gift a scarf to Hae Min,
and in that memo this lady had written
when a Muslim man gives a woman a scarf
that's a sign that he owns her.
Now I'm a Muslim, that is not a thing,
it's not a thing (chuckles).
But that is the thing that the police
and the prosecution began relying on
and they said, this is our suspect.
Now this is very common in wrongful conviction cases
that the police very early on have tunnel vision
on one suspect to the exclusion of others.
But let's talk a little bit more about the suspect.
How do I know Adnan?
Like I said, Adnan was (mumbles)
but I've known Adnan since he was 13 years old.
Adnan is my younger brother's best friend.
My younger brother is six years younger than me
and with Adnan was in high school that year
and when he was eventually arrested
six weeks after her body was found, I was in law school.
And I was a married woman, I had a daughter,
and I had an infant.
I lived in Northern Virginia.
This all happened in Baltimore, Maryland an hour away
but I used to visit my parents every weekend.
I'd had spent the weekend with them, bring my daughter,
they loved to be around their granddaughter.
And for six weeks I would watch the local news
and the news would say local girl missing,
local girl missing and then Hae Min Lee's body is found.
And I was like this is terrible.
And then one day I'm sitting in my parents couch
and all of a sudden news report
of a suspect has been arrested in the murder of Hae Min Lee,
his name is Adnan Syed and a picture of Adnan comes up
and I sat up, shot up out of the sofa.
I'm like what is Adnan's picture doing on the television?
'Cause I know Adnan and I know his parents
'cause they live a couple of streets down the street,
down in the neighborhood from my parents.
And it was shocking.
And there's still footage on YouTube.
It's terrible footage of me,
with terrible footage of me and my mother
going to Adnan's house that evening,
trying talk to his parents
to see if there's anything we could do.
He had been taken out of bed at 5:00 a.m.
and arrested for her murder.
We didn't know what was going on.
And in our community, in that local Baltimore community,
there was a mosque right down the street from Adnan's home.
His parents were very kind of conservative,
culturally conservative Muslims,
but also extremely simple people.
They didn't have a television at home.
They just kind of raised their sons at the mosque,
they had three sons, Adnan was the middle child.
He was kind of the the favorite, the golden child.
He was the best-looking, he was very charismatic,
really sweet kid, really good in school,
wanted to go to med school.
He was like junior prom king blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
all that stuff.
What they didn't know is that Adnan
was also a very healthy red-blooded American teenager
who was dating, sleeping around, smoking pot,
drinking and going to parties.
And the fact that he was doing those things
without his parents knowledge, which is a surprise,
it should never be a shock
that teenagers are doing things
without their parents' knowledge,
but that was actually used as evidence against him
in the court of law, that he was leading a double life
that he was leading a nefarious double life.
And, I remember in our community
when that was first said in court at his bail hearing,
it kind of sent a shockwave through the community
because all the other kids were like, wait a minute,
that's us to though, like we're all kind of doing that.
And I can tell you like every South Asian kid is doing that,
I'm just telling you right now,
South Asian parents I'm sorry it's true.
So what was the evidence against Adnan?
Well, the evidence was one thing.
It was a witness, his name was Jay Wilds.
He was a state's witness who said to the police
that Adnan killed Hae Min Lee after school that day
'cause she broke up with him and that he then called Jay
and said meet me at the Best Buy,
we all remember the Best Buy, meet me at the Best Buy.
That he opened up the trunk of his car
and showed him the body and then said help me bury her.
But instead of burying her, they parked the car somewhere.
Adnan had to go back to school
'cause he had track practice
'cause you know when you've killed somebody
that's really priority.
And he went back to track practice and after track practice,
Jay picked him back up
and they went and buried her Leakin Park,
where her body was found.
This was Jay's story.
So, the evidence is a witness.
They conducted forensics according to Jay's story
because Jay said that Adnan had her body
and in the trunk of his car,
they said that Adnan was in Leakin Park.
It's not like a pretty park.
These are the woods.
You see the Leakin Park, there're woods.
It takes effort to get in and out of Leakin Park.
And the way her body was found
was also very suspicious and troubling
because there's a man who said
he went into the park 120 feet to take a leak
when he pooled over on the opposite side of the road
that he just happened to see her body.
When the city surveyor went to go look with the police
to find her, he said he was standing on top of the body
and couldn't see it.
There's a lot of questions
about how that man found that body.
And that man also failed a polygraph,
but that man was very quickly eliminated because again,
even before the body was found,
the police had their suspect.
So they did all the forensics.
There was a couple of hairs found on Hae Min Lee's body.
So they tested it against Adnan.
They tested it against Jay, African-American man.
Jay, by the way, was 19 years old.
He knew these kids
'cause he had gone at Woodlawn High School with them
and graduated the year earlier.
And he supplied them pot.
The hair didn't match Hae Min Lee,
it didn't match Adnan, it didn't match Jay.
They took all of Adnan's clothing,
they tore up his car, they went to his house,
they got the carpets, they didn't find a single soil sample
that matched Leakin Park.
They tore the lining of his trunk out, no body fluids.
There was no evidence,
there was not a single bit of forensic evidence
tying Adnan to the crime,
which another way to think about it
'cause it's all about framing,
is that all the forensics excluded Adnan.
When her car was finally found,
there are 16 sets of fingerprints in that car
that the police never determined who they belonged to,
because they didn't match Adnan, they didn't match to Jay
and they didn't match the victim Hae.
What the police didn't do was say,
well, we've got this hair and we've got these fingerprints,
maybe we should check and see if they match anybody else.
Maybe we should take hair samples
and fingerprint her actual boyfriend
or maybe somebody else she worked with,
or somebody she went to school with,
or somebody in her family,
or somebody was chatting online with, or anything.
So you've got a victim who's got these hairs on her body
and fingerprints in her car that don't match anybody
and they proceed with the prosecution.
Adnan was convicted.
There were two trials.
The first trial happened
towards the end of 1999 in December,
and I was again in law school.
I was taking my final exams and I could not attend.
And one of the things we have to understand
when we think about the criminal justice system,
yeah, these are public proceedings, who shows up?
Who gives up work and school
to sit in a courtroom during the daytime?
Nobody.
Most courtrooms are empty when you go there.
It can be a serious case
where somebody might be facing the death penalty
and there might be nobody in that courtroom
watching what's happening, okay?
This is true for criminal proceedings,
it's true for immigration proceedings
and everything in between.
The second trial, that trial ended in a mistrial.
It ended in a mistrial
because his lawyer committed some misconduct
in the courtroom and the judge called her liar.
It didn't go well, called a mistrial end of that.
They were just a few days into the trial.
The second trial was just a few months later,
or a month later, and I happened to be on break from school
so I was able to attend that trial.
And the trial, well it lasted
actually I can't remember how long it lasted,
it lasted a few weeks, but about 90% of the trial
was a prosecutor putting on their case,
the defense counsel put on a case for about three days,
2 1/2, three days.
The jury was out.
I remember the day that they gave the closing arguments,
I was there, and the judge dismissed the jury
to begin their deliberations.
And it was early in the morning,
it was around 10:00 or 11:00, if I'm remembering correctly.
And I thought, okay, let's go grab some lunch.
It's a Friday, let's go grab some lunch
and I guess we're just gonna go home
'cause we'll hear from them like in Monday or Tuesday,
whenever they're done deliberating.
We were still thinking
about where we're gonna go for lunch when,
it was about two hours later,
well, I had gone for a walk first
and other people were trying to come and meet me in the city
for lunch when I got a call saying that the jury is ready
to return their verdict.
This is like in 2 1/2 hours in a murder case
with a life sentence.
So I thought this can only be,
this can only be an acquittal.
There's no way they can convict a juvenile of murder
in 2 1/2 hours when you have weeks and weeks of evidence
and testimony to deliberate over.
Anyhow, we go back and Adnan was convicted on all charges.
And the charge, and this is another way the system works,
prosecutors don't just charged with one charge.
They will add everything they can.
They'll throw the kitchen sink at it, at the defendant.
So you had murder, you had kidnapping
because they said that Adnan somewhere,
somewhere intervened, found Hae Min Lee,
they don't know where, and took off with her
and then he killed her.
So kidnapping, theft because her purse was missing,
her car keys were missing, her pager was missing,
all of these things.
Now, Adnan was convicted for two reasons.
The first is incompetence.
And when I sat in that trial and I, again was a law student,
I could not understand what I was seeing.
Adnan's trial counsel, his defense attorney
was a very highly-celebrated woman named Christina Gutierrez
with like a 30, 40 year career in Baltimore
as one of the best criminal defense attorneys.
But what I saw was a woman who was incoherent,
rambling, angry and just complete,
I didn't understand what was going on.
I saw people in the jury asleep.
There were times when she wouldn't finish a sentence.
There were times when she would repeat the same sentence
over and over and over and I kept looking around thinking,
and here's the thing, I was in that courtroom
'cause I didn't have classes during those few weeks.
Behind me were just elders from our community
who didn't even understand what's going on.
And all those elders look like people,
men with beards and women wearing scarfs like me,
and then you have a jury from Baltimore city
that is not a jury of Adnan's peers
in any way, shape, or form.
They don't our community.
All they see is what they're seeing visually, right?
But Adnan's religion
and his ethnicity were mentioned 270 times in the trial
in a murder case.
Now, I would say that that's unconstitutional.
I would say that is abhorrent,
I would say that it's unethical and immoral
to do that to a 17-year-old juvenile,
to use his religion against him.
Some of the questions the Prosecutor asked,
he called in a witness,
one of the Adnan's friends from the mosque,
and asked him really weird questions.
How many times a day do you pray?
what direction do you pray in?
Do women pray behind you or next to you?
How do you fold your hands when you pray?
Like, what are you doing?
What was the purpose of these?
I'll tell you what the purpose of these were.
It was to alienate our community.
It was to make us seem like we are so weird.
And you know years later,
when Sarah Koenig, who created Serial,
went and spoke to some jury members,
they said yeah, that was kind of an issue.
The religion thing was kind of an issue
'cause these Arab guys are not so great to their women.
So the incompetence here
was that his lawyer did not challenge
any of these 270 times.
In fact, many of the time she brought them up herself.
And fear, was the other reason he was convicted.
And that is because of the religious issue.
And the other reason incompetence came into play was this,
Adnan's lawyer shortly after his trial
in about a year or two after his trial was disbarred,
and then she died.
We did not know at the time of his trial
that she was handling nine murder cases at the same time,
which is unheard of even for the most competent attorney
at the top of their game that she had a cognitive disability
that she had muscle muscular dystrophy
that she had, I'm sorry, she had multiple sclerosis.
Some people said she might have had cancer at the time
that she was, she might have been on drugs.
There was a time when she asked Adnan's parents
for $10,000 in a paper bag.
Lawyers, don't do that, shouldn't be doing that.
And they gave it to her.
Something was very wrong.
But she was disbarred, not because of Adnan's case.
Adnan tried to file a complaint against her
and it was rejected because he wasn't able to show
like the receipts of all the payments.
The complaint he was filing was that we paid her
to do things she didn't do.
For example, I was there in her office
when his parents wrote a check for $5,000
to bust the jury to the crime scene and she never did it.
But he wasn't able to provide the evidence,
so his complaint was rejected.
However, 40 other complaints against Christina Gutierrez
got her disbarred.
She broke the record for attorney grievances
in the state of Maryland
and that record has never since been broken,
she holds that record.
There was an attorney grievance commission fund
that pays victims.
She bankrupted it.
That's how many people they had to pay out.
These are things by the way,
I don't think Serial talked about.
So Adnan was in the hands
of somebody who was on her last legs,
and then like I said, she died 'cause she was that sick.
So then what?
What are you stuck with?
You're stuck with appeals.
And I can tell you this,
once you've been convicted in this country,
your chances of winning appeal are maybe 1%, 2%, 3%.
That's it.
So we began the appellate process.
And if you know anything about the law,
you'll understand that you can't just go to an appeal,
the appellate court and say, I want to try this issue again,
I'm gonna try this case again,
and I want to try this fact again, or bring this witness.
You're not even allowed to bring new evidence.
You could find evidence, you can find a video tape
of somebody else committing that crime
and you cannot raise it in appeal.
What you can raise are technical issues in the trial,
like the judge made incorrect legal rulings,
the lawyer made a technical mistake.
Anyhow, we tried it, didn't work.
First appeal lost, second appeal lost, third appeal lost.
The years are rolling by, the years are rolling by.
But here's the thing I had a piece of new evidence
that I was holding because we couldn't use it yet
but I was holding it
pretty much from the day that Adnan was convicted
because the day he was convicted I went to see him in prison
in the holding cell in the city.
And I said Adnan I said, "You know,
"the prosecution says, they said they're closing arguments
"that Hae Min Lee left school around two o'clock
"and she was dead by 2:36 p.m.
"All you had to do
"was account for 30 minutes of your time after school
"that's it."
And Adnan said, "You know,
"they arrested me like two months later,
"2 1/2 months later," he's like,
"all I know is everyday my routine was the same.
"I'd finish classes, I'd hang out until track practice
"at the school, I go to the library sometimes,
"sometimes I do my homework, I've just whatever,
"just hang out until track practice at three o'clock.
"So there's an hour there."
And then he goes, "But you know,
"there was this girl who wrote me these letters
"when I first got arrested a year ago
"and she said she remembered being with me in the library
"that day for very specific reasons."
I said, "Well, I never heard of her.
"How come she wasn't at trial?"
He said, "Well, I gave the letters to my lawyer,"
Again, very, very sick Christina Gutierrez,
"and the lawyer came back to me and said,
"I checked her dates out and she had her dates wrong."
He's like, "So that's the end of that."
He's like, "That's the only possible person
"who might have accounted for my time."
I said, "Give me her name, give me her number.
"I'm gonna contact her."
So a couple of weeks after his conviction,
I contacted Asia McClain and I went to see her
and they just said I wrote those letters over a year ago
'cause I remember being at the library,
I remember why it was that day.
I remember my boyfriend coming to pick me up and being angry
that I was talking to Adnan.
I remember being stuck in a snowstorm that night.
I remember school being closed the next two days.
Everything she told me I went and verified
to see was school really closed that day,
was there a snowstorm?
I was able to independently verify
like the things that she remembered.
And then I said, "Well, why didn't you appear at trial?"
She said, "Well, nobody ever contacted me."
So Adnan's lawyer had an alibi in her hand
and she never contacted the alibi.
And in all those appeals down the road,
we could not raise it
because that's considered new evidence.
We had to wait for something called post conviction.
10 years down.
So 10 years have passed.
What am I doing?
Now, I'm gonna take a step back and tell you
about what I'm doing with my life in the meantime.
In the meantime, like I said,
I had been law school when Adnan was arrested.
I went on to graduate from law school shortly after 9/11.
And while I wanted to be a corporate attorney,
while I was in law school,
the demands of our community after 9/11 drastically changed.
Suddenly we needed civil rights lawyers,
we needed lawyers working with law enforcement,
we did all kinds of people in national security.
And, I was a lawyer a time when everybody in our community
was going to medical school or engineering school.
And so I was like a failed doctor basically.
My parents were like, what is she doing?
We're so humiliated that she's going to law school.
(attendees laughing) And that's not even,
that's actually true.
It wasn't until after 9/11,
they're like, well, maybe, maybe it's important work.
And while I had been working in immigration,
suddenly the nexus of immigration
and civil rights became very clear
because immigrants were being targeted,
immigration policies were being used
to enforce national security policies.
And so I began working on these issues.
But I also became kind of an advocate
in the Muslim community.
I began writing, speaking, doing trainings,
doing all kinds of things.
Again, the appeals are going forward.
Well, we're finally ready for the post conviction appeal
and we're like, we need to bring Asia to court.
We're gonna present this witness finally,
who's gonna say I was with him
at the time the victim was killed literally,
I was literally with him at the time the victim was killed.
We send a private investigator
to find Asia McClain who was the alibi witness.
And Asian McClain tells our private investigator,
I'm not coming, I will not testify for Adnan.
And we didn't know what happened.
It was like a punch to the face.
We had waited about 12 years for this.
So we went to the hearing.
I testified and I said, "Well, I met with Asia.
"These are the documents she gave.
"She gave me an affidavit
"and she had she wrote these letters to Adnan."
The judge is like, why isn't the witness here?
And you know what happened?
The original prosecutor of the case from 12, 13 years prior,
gets on the stand on behalf of the state
and he says, "Well, the witness called me.
"The witness called me
"because this private investigator visited her and said,
"'Come testify.'
"And that witness told me that she wrote those documents
"because she had been under duress
"and pressure by the family and by me."
And I was sitting in that courtroom thinking that is a lie,
that's a complete and utter lie.
And it was shocking to my system
'cause I didn't know what was happening.
But in that one blow it was over.
I was like that's it, we're gonna lose this case.
Now whenever you have a hearing it takes like months
and months to get like an actual ruling from a judge
but we left depressed.
I was like a prosecutor decided on stand
and said the only alibi eyewitness he had
made those claims under duress from the family.
He's not gonna believe us.
So then I started thinking, what are we gonna do?
And for years I had thought maybe we need to go to the media
'cause I'd watch Dateline and 20/20,
and I'm like, we need another investigators.
And I watched a documentary that night, not that night
but a few weeks later,
I was watching this documentary on Netflix
called West of Memphis.
How many people are familiar with the West Memphis case?
I really urge you to take a look at this case.
There's been like four or five documentaries
made about this brutal murder of three little boys,
a triple homicide in which three teenagers were convicted.
What you're gonna find is every single documentary
that was made, everyone you watch you're gonna be like,
oh no, it was that person.
Oh no, it was that person.
Oh no.
It will completely shift your understanding of the case
and when I watch this very final documentary,
I think the fourth or the fifth of this,
in all the documentaries made on the case
called West of Memphis, I suddenly was like,
it's all about how you tell the story, right?
And about who's covering the story and what they find.
We have to get media involved.
I turned off the documentary and I said,
"I'm gonna find a journalist
"who may be wrote about Adnan's case back in 1999."
And this is again, 2013.
And the very first name that came up was Sarah Koenig.
Sarah Koenig worked for the Baltimore Sun.
She hadn't written about Adnan's case,
but she had written about Adnan's lawyer being disbarred.
And I thought, well,
I'm just gonna find her wherever she is
and she happened to be a producer at NPR,
or This American Life, excuse me.
So I shot her an email and I said,
"Well look, here's the deal.
"There's this case that happened,
"and you covered the story about the lawyer
"and you might be interested and you know, whatever,
"I just think somebody should look into it."
And the next day or a day or two later,
I got a response saying,
"Okay, well, let's just talk about it on the phone."
And we talked a little bit
and a week later she came to see me.
And when you hear Serial,
the very first episode what you hear is
me talking and my brother talking.
That was the very first time we met Sarah Koenig
and we started telling her about the case
and she was immediately hooked.
Now she spent 10 months,
10, 11 months investigating the case.
And as she investigated,
I didn't know what she was finding,
I just kind of worked as a fixer.
You need to talk to that person in the community,
I'll connect you here.
You need these documents, I'll get them for you here.
Whatever you need, I'll give to you.
I didn't know what she was finding.
I didn't know what she was going to create.
What I thought was gonna happen was,
at the end of all of this will be a one-hour,
This American Life episode about the case maybe.
But I also didn't care
'cause it wasn't about the final product.
What I wanted to know is did she find the smoking gun?
Did she get a witness to talk?
Did she find new evidence
that's gonna get Adnan back in court?
Now I have to say this, I had to convince,
I actually convinced Sarah Koenig
before I convinced Adnan and his lawyer.
I did this without their permission.
Most criminal defense lawyers
will never let a journalist close to client.
They just don't do it, it doesn't happen.
They won't even let their clients testify in court
even if they're innocent.
So it would have been a very hard sell except
for the fact that his lawyer who have been working with us,
a very great, wonderful lawyer,
who had been working with us for about six years at the time
said, "I'm kind of done with this case anyways.
"We're losing the post conviction.
"There's nothing else I can do.
"It's over, do whatever you want."
And Adnan said, "Okay,
"because he just wanted to get me off his back."
He was like this journalist is not gonna find anything,
nothing's gonna come of this.
Rabia has worked so hard I just want to make her happy.
So at the end of 10 months, in the August of 2014,
Sarah Koenig calls me and said,
"We're turning this into a 10 part,
"we're turning this into a podcast, 12 parts."
And I said, "What is a podcast?"
I didn't know what a podcast is.
I had no idea what a podcast was.
And she's like well it's a series of Internet shows.
I'm like, "Internet shows?
"Who's gonna listen to an Internet show?"
And at this point, 10, 12 months in again,
no evidence, nothing new, other than what she was able to do
was she was able to talk to Asia McLean, that alibi witness
and tell her that you didn't show up in court
so this is what the prosecutor said.
And Asia said to her, "That's a lie."
I never made those statements under duress.
I did not write those documents under duress.
And the prosecutor actually had spoken to me.
She said, when the private investigator came to me
from Adnan team to ask me to come testify,
she said, "All I could think was this convicted killer
"has found me, like across the country."
She lives like across the country.
She's like, "He found me, he knows where I live,
now he wants me to come help him get out of prison."
So she's like, "I called the prosecutor from the case
"and I said, 'Why was Adnan convicted?'"
And the prosecutor told her,
he was convicted on the basis of DNA evidence,
incontrovertibly evidence.
He's looking for a loophole to get out, don't help him.
The prosecutor tampered with this witness.
She believed him and that same man then got on the stand
and told the judge that this witness told me
she had been forced to make those documents.
So Serial,
Sarah Koenig was able to solve that mystery for us.
And we thought, okay,
how are we gonna use this to get back in court?
We got to figure that out.
Now when Serial happened, it was an overnight sensation.
I don't know if you guys remember the first couple of weeks,
they dropped two episodes each week.
I had a blog at the time, I was blogging,
I still have a blog but I haven't blogged in a while.
And again, I didn't know what they're gonna talk about.
But what I decided to do was as every episode dropped,
I would write a blog about it.
Now, this really upset the Serial team.
They did not want me inserting myself but I said,
"Well, I'm not gonna like preempt anything you're gonna say,
"I'm just gonna respond to your episode
"and fill in some context."
And that was kind of like me trying to take that power back
and balance the narrative a bit.
But the other thing I was doing was this,
because I had worked for about 10 years
in American Muslim Advocacy,
I had worked with New America Foundation,
I'd worked with Google, Facebook, Twitter,
on social media advocacy, I was like I know how to do this.
I can turn this into a thing on social media.
So I created the hashtag #freeadnan.
And I began tweeting it.
People asked me later, did you have a social media team?
I'm like, "No, it was me and my smartphone on the toilet.
"That was it.
"It was just me tweeting in my sleep.
"It was tweet, tweet,
"it was just me on that phone constantly doing it."
And the attention that Serial attracted was incredible.
It was a global phenomenon.
I think I gave interviews to Radio Ireland like four times.
I don't know why Ireland's obsessed with this case
but they love it. (attendees laughing)
I interviewed with CNN India,
Australia has one of the highest listenerships.
It was crazy.
But what Serial also did was this,
it brought resources to the case.
Suddenly other lawyers, investigators,
people who had some kind of forensic background
reaching out to us and saying,
"Hey, you need some help?
"Hey, maybe I can help you here.
"Hey, I think these are some discrepancies."
And I had began on my blog uploading case documents.
I was like, have at it.
Just look at the documents.
And I'm not a criminal investigator.
I don't know how to do this.
I need help, people help me.
And there were two lawyers whose blogs I'd been reading,
Susan Simpson and Collin Miller.
Because I'm like they're reading these documents
and they're seeing things I've never seen before
and I began reading their blogs.
And they were astonishing.
Susan Simpson wrote a 40-page blog
on cell phone tower pings (chuckles).
I'm not kidding.
But what she did in that blog
was she broke down how the state's witness,
his testimony actually didn't match
the cell phone tower evidence at all
but Serial said it did.
So Serial did a lot of great things
but what Serial was unable to do
was actually conduct a real legal investigation of the case.
They got some things wrong.
Okay, it happens, but some things they,
and I got into arguments with them about,
I'll give you an example.
They did one episode
in which they talked about the police involved in this case.
Now, having done now
about 12, 13 other wrongful conviction cases since Serial,
that's become the bulk of my work, you see patterns.
If you're looking at cases from Philadelphia,
it'll be the same three cops
that pop up in every case over and over.
There are patterns of misconduct.
It's always a few bad apples
that just mess up the whole basket.
And I said to Sarah,
I said, "The cops in Adnan's case
"have been cited in other cases for coercing witnesses,
"there have been people exonerated
"and sued the same cops for false prosecution
"and for like contriving evidence."
I said, "You should mention that.
"These are active cases.
"Mention that in the podcast."
But she was like, "No, in the podcast
"it's like they're basically good guys
"just doing their work."
That's not true.
I'm not saying they're not good guys,
I'm saying they weren't doing their jobs.
And since then there's at least five cases I can name
out of Baltimore from the same era
that involve the same cops
in which three men have already been exonerated
because they use the same kind of tactics.
What Serial didn't do
was talk about the most important piece of evidence
in a case where you don't have real forensic evidence
and that's the body.
A body, an autopsy can tell you a lot about a crime,
a lot about a homicide.
It can tell you how that person was killed,
it could tell you how long they've been dead,
it can tell you if the body's been moved
and when you have 12 episodes on a murder case
that's a mystery,
because that's what people loved about Serial right,
the mystery.
Did he do didn't he do it?
Is he a great guy?
I mean (scoffs),
the choices were he's an amazing guy
who has been screwed or he's a complete psychopath, right?
But when you have a murder mystery like that,
you should look at the body
and they didn't look at the body.
So I want to talk now about the evidence of innocence
because what happened with Serial
was it brought us the resources
that helped us find the evidence of innocence.
And one of those things was the body, the autopsy.
Now, if you remember the timeline of the murder was this
that Hae left school around two o'clock.
The state says she's dead by 2:36.
According to their states witness,
she's been buried by around 7:30pm that night.
Okay?
She was left dumped in the grave kind of contorted,
her body was on its side, but slightly facing forward
with one arm behind her back,
one arm like raised like this under head.
It's hard to describe but she was not laid out flat,
let's just say it like that.
But here's what the autopsy showed.
The autopsy showed something called full frontal lividity.
And when a person dies, if you die on your back,
if you die on your back,
and your body just lays there for seven, eight hours,
all the blood will pool to the bottom of your body.
And the bottom of your body, if they lift you,
if they've turn you over is going to be purple,
smooth and purple all the way down.
That's lividity, that's your blood pooling.
And medical examiners can tell
if somebody's body has been turned
like somewhere in that first eight hours.
'Cause after eight hours,
you can turn the body however you want,
eight to 10 hours, the blood won't move.
But if the body's been turned before it fixes,
then they'll see.
They'll see the blood was over here
then it kind of shifted here, then it kind of shift,
they can actually tell how the body's been moved.
What Hae had was full frontal lividity,
meaning all of the blood was pooled on the very front of her
in a very smooth uninterrupted pattern.
So when Hae Min Lee was killed
that means she was lying flat on her face for 10 to 12 hours
during which time the lividity fixed.
She was never moved for eight to 10, to 12 hours.
And then she was dumped in Leakin Park.
That autopsy report alone is evidence of innocence.
That autopsy report alone
shows the state got everything wrong
about how and when she was killed.
Hae Min Lee was not left in that part at 7:00 p.m.,
she couldn't have.
If she had been left at that park at 7:00 p.m.,
her lividity would have been in this arm,
on the side of her thing, on part of this torso,
it would have been all over.
It wouldn't have been
like she had been lying flat on her face
for 10 hours straight and then moved.
Now, she could have been moved later that night,
she could have been moved two days later.
That, we'll never know, that we well, we might
but that we don't know is what I'm trying to say.
Then you have the witness Jay Wilds.
And so the question is this,
and in all these years I thought well if Adnan didn't do it,
he says he didn't do it, I always asked him about Jay,
he's like, and Adnan was always confused like,
I don't think Jay had anything to do with it,
why would Jay kill her?
I don't know why he's saying these things.
We didn't know why either.
And Jay's statement, not just during the trial
but even in the police statements he gave before the trial,
changed about eight times.
We had a spreadsheet
that was about 60-pages thick, about this big,
that track the number of changes in Jay's stories.
And if you remember in Serial, Sarah Koenig says,
trying to track Jay's stories
is like trying to track somebody's dream,
she says something like that, right?
But the thing is, the problem is this,
it wasn't Jay's dream, it was the police officer's dream.
What we discovered was this,
and Susan Simpson pieced this together.
She took a timeline of Jay's statements
and when they changed
and then she took a timeline of the police investigation.
Every time the police found something new,
Jay's statement would change
to accommodate this new evidence.
Then the police would find,
for example, in the first interview,
what did you do with her purse?
We threw it in the car, we threw in the woods.
Oh-oh, the police just found the person
in the trunk of a car.
What did you do with the purse?
We put in the trunk of her car.
Like this is way the statements kept changing
and changing the changing.
At one point he says,
"Before I had to drop off at track practice,
"we went to this park, another park.
"like 10 miles away, we smoked joints, just randomly,
"and then we went back."
And then that park story disappeared.
Why?
Because the police had the phone records
and what they had done was taking the cell tower that pinged
and they had put it in the wrong place on the map.
Their original police map showed the tower here,
when it was actually here.
And suddenly Jay had to make a story that said,
oh, we were over here.
But then when they fixed it, fixed the map,
the story disappears.
So now we know that what Jay was doing,
was what happens in a lot of wrongful convictions,
and that is he had become a witness who was coerced
into giving statements to support the police's case.
And then three years ago, Jays attorney,
who defended him at the time emailed me.
And she said, this is what happened, she said,
she had walked into a room where Jay Wilds was sitting,
he's a 19-year-old black, a young black men, 19 years old,
in Baltimore, in the 1990s,
when things are not very good for young black men,
and the prosecutor said to him,
I'm gonna charge you with the murder
and I'm gonna charge you in the county
'cause Baltimore County is white,
and I'm gonna ask for the death penalty.
So your choice is you become a state's witness
or you're gonna get executed for this crime.
And so she helped negotiate a plea deal
in which Jay agreed to give testimony against Adnan
in exchange for basically a complete immunity.
He never spent a day in prison,
even though according to his own testimony,
he said he helped bury the body.
So Jay is now also like kind of the case is solved
when it comes to Jay.
Well, we have all this new evidence.
We have the alibi witness back in the story.
We have Jay Wilds, he continues to give new statements
that keep changing.
And we were able than in the last couple of years
to get Adnan's conviction overturned twice.
One court said well, we're gonna throw this conviction out
because his attorney didn't fulfill her duty
because she did not basically do a good job
interrogating the experts on the cell phone tower evidence.
The state appealed.
The state filed an appeal, we said okay,
that'll be another year, year and a half of his life.
We win the next appeal
and the court said we're throwing out his conviction
because his lawyer didn't contact the alibi witness.
And the state appealed again.
And so now we are in our third appeal.
We just had the hearing in November.
This is the highest court in Maryland right now,
that's where we are.
And he will probably win one more time.
I actually think Adnan's gonna come home this year,
because if he wins one more time,
they have a couple of options.
Number one, they can take him to trial.
Number two, they can try to go to the US Supreme Court,
which is highly unlikely, which would never take this case.
And number three, they can offer them a plea deal
or other terms to just release him.
Now we are prepared for a trial if we need to,
I just don't know how they would go back to trial
with this autopsy report, with the cell tower evidence,
with what we know about Jay
and with a lot of other evidence, by the way
that has been discovered by a new team of investigators
that for the last three years
have been investigating this case
and are gonna tell that story in a new documentary series
that's gonna air on HBO in a month.
So, this story went from a local Baltimore state crime,
the prosecutor in one of the interviews,
or when he spoke to the Serial folks,
said this was just like an average homicide case.
And it was.
And that actually should terrify you.
That doesn't mean it was okay what happened,
it just means in an average homicide case
what can go wrong for somebody,
when it goes wrong everything goes wrong, right?
Because if you think about happened in Adnan's case,
if his defense counsel was competent
he could have won this trial
if the police did their job ethically
and didn't coerce a witness,
he probably never would have been charged.
Hae's body,
you have a young woman who's been brutally murdered
and a rape kit was taken in 1999.
We never understood what happened to the rape kit
and why the DNA evidence wasn't tested
until we got a copy of the prosecutors file years later.
And on the top of the file, it said hold the testing,
do not test.
The prosecutor in the case stop the medical examiner,
stopped the lab, the city lab, from testing a rape kit.
Why?
'Cause they don't want to mess up this prosecution.
They don't want to get a result back
that is suddenly gonna say, we made this arrest,
we announced it on TV and we got it wrong.
If one of those actors, the police, the prosecutor,
defense counsel had done their job right,
we wouldn't be 20 years out with Adnan who was 17 then,
turning 37 this year.
Now,
a lot of people ask me what was so special?
It's really odd to me when people ask me that question,
why did it become such a phenomenon?
Like why was it such a big deal, this case?
And Sarah Koenig didn't know it's gonna blow up like this.
And I think Serial the first season
has like 800 million downloads.
It's insane.
Why did this become a story
that became a New York Times bestseller?
Why is it now an HBO documentary series?
Like what was so amazing about this case?
And again, the truth is really nothing.
It was an ordinary wrongful conviction.
Every wrongful conviction I've worked on since
has had almost exactly the same elements
where the police very early on hone on a suspect,
they refuse to follow leads like the hair,
like the fingerprints, like the rape kit.
It has defense counsel that didn't do their job
and it has prosecutors who hid evidence
but what was special about this was the storytelling.
That's what set it apart.
What Sarah Koenig was able to do, what I realized
and what I realized also was a failure as an advocate.
All these years, now Serial came out in 2014.
So from 9/11 to 2014,
me and hundreds of American and Muslim activists
and advocates had been trying desperately
to humanize Muslims in America in the aftermath,
and in the ongoing war on terror,
saying we are not the enemy.
We've been here for 400 years.
We are part of your community.
We are your doctors.
We are your lawyers.
We are your shawarma makers. (attendees laughing)
But we kept failing.
We failed miserably
because every single year the polling showed
that anti-muslim sentiment grew in this country.
We were better off right after 9/11 than we are today.
Today we have Muslim bans and it's okay.
Today we have
Islamophobia as policy, and it's okay.
So why did this happen?
And I realized because what we were doing was saying,
Islam is a religion of peace.
Here, look at this textbook, here, you look at the.
We did not tell our stories.
We never told our stories as American Muslims.
We did not talk about our failures, our vulnerabilities,
our hopes, our dreams, our successes,
we just said this is what the religion says.
Look at the book, here's the Scripture, this is the.
1,500 years ago, people don't care.
What Sarah Koenig did was was she told the story
of an American Muslim man
who if people saw him walking down the street today
would probably be scared of Adnan,
even though he's like a gentle giant.
Why?
'Cause he wears that Muslim skull cap
that's very common in prisons.
And he has a beard
and he is not a sympathetic looking guy at all (chuckles)
to the Western imagination he's not.
And his advocate is a woman like me who wears a scarf
and his mother wears a scarf
and his dad looks like father time with a beard this long.
There's not a single one of us that are sympathetic looking.
But what Sarah Koenig was able to do was humanize us
through her power of storytelling.
And I realized why we had gotten it wrong so many years.
Our advocacy was failing on that issue.
The other that Sarah Koenig taught me was this,
you don't need the mainstream media anymore
to tell your story.
You can control your narrative.
I did it with my blog.
I did it using social media.
And then I did it with the podcast Undisclosed.
And I want to talk a little bit about that.
I have literally no idea how much time I have.
So I wanna not.
(woman speaks off mic)
Oh, I'm way over.
I'm way over.
I did not know.
If anybody tried to signal me to shut up I'm sorry.
So I want to talk a little bit about Undisclosed
and I'll stop there then and we'll do Q&A.
Those two lawyers I mentioned earlier,
Susan Simpson and Colin Miller, whose blogs I began reading,
had written over the course of five or six months,
hundreds of pages of blogs about Adnan's case,
and brought to light
all the things that I didn't understand.
And when Serial ended, somebody came to us and said,
"Nobody's gonna read your blogs.
"Nobody's reading 40 pages on cell phone sites.
"Turn it into a podcast."
Now I'm gonna say, for the folks who've listened to Serial,
and I've had people come up to me and say,
I've listened to Serial five times.
So I totally know what's happening in this case,
I'm like, no you don't. (attendees laughing)
Just listen to the first three episodes of Undisclosed.
And you will also, by the way,
realize how we suck at storytelling, but we're good lawyers.
But you're gonna hear things that are going to shock you,
including audio of Jay being coached by the police
in real time.
So Undisclosed happened.
We did 40 episodes of Adnan's case,
that's how granular we went into the evidence
and the legal procedures in this case,
and then we were flooded with requests
from innocence projects, from defendants,
from lawyer saying,
I have a person who's been in prison 18 years,
I have a person has been in prison 28 years,
I have a person we've hit a wall, can you help us?
So since then we've done about 12 or 13 cases.
It's frustrating.
It takes an average of 18 years to exonerate a person.
It takes money, resources, investigators,
it takes a lot of effort.
And so that's been like kind of the bulk of the work.
And in about 1/2 the cases, we have been able to help
either get them back in court or actually get them out.
Now, I mentioned earlier
that there's gonna be an HBO series
that's gonna air in about a month.
Another reason I'm in this area, in two days
I'll be presenting at the TV Critics Association Conference
on HBO panel with the director and others about this series.
So I hope you watch the series
because of Adnan's story is not over, he is still in prison.
He's still in prison.
He was denied bail again,
because the state won't stop appealing.
And so I'm gonna end my talk as I began
that Adnan like many, many others,
tens of thousands of people is innocent
and I hope that you continue to follow his story
until he's home.
Thank you. (attendees applause)
Sorry.
We now have time for questions.
Few pointers before we begin.
Please raise your hand one of us will bring a mic to you.
Please stand up when you ask your question
and priority will have to go to students.
I do have to add that please try to keep your questions
as concise as possible
so that we can get as many people, thank you.
Hi, I just want to thank you for coming
and sharing Adnan's story.
I was wondering if Hae Min Lee's family has been involved
in any such way in this investigation or still in the case
and whether they believe his innocence.
Yeah, Sarah Koenig tried very hard to contact her family
and was unable to locate them.
When Adnan got a second post conviction hearing,
which he won, and his conviction was thrown out,
the prosecutor in that case did a press conference
and said I have a statement from the family.
And the statement did not support Adnan.
The statement said basically
that this is kind of reopening old wounds
and we basically believe this man belongs in prison.
And that highlights another issue
in the criminal justice system which is that,
often victims' families and defendant's families
are pitted against each other.
And in other countries,
they actually have kind of mechanisms
where are there are like advocacy organizations
that will kind of help the parties
not be pitted against one another like,
victims rights organizations and stuff.
And I wish, I wish I could sit down
with just a member of the family
or a member of the community and say,
don't you think this girl's death deserves another look?
Don't you think that rape kit should be tested?
Don't you think the person who those hair belongs to
should be identified to do this right?
So we have had no contact with them.
And it would be highly unethical
for me to go look for them frankly.
But I have always issued an open invitation
that I would sit down with them, our investigators,
our lawyers with sit down with them anytime.
Hi, thank you for your talk.
So I have two questions.
The first one being do you think the refusal
of the police investigators at the time
ruined the chances of finding the real killer
and two, how has Serial personally affected your life?
So yeah, this is one of the most difficult issues
that an investigator or lawyer faces
when they have like a 20-year-old wrongful conviction,
or a 15-year-old, is finding that evidence
from all that time ago.
Witnesses have died, evidence gets lost, right?
We were told in Adnan's case the DNA evidence
was lost in a warehouse somewhere.
It's not always true, sometimes it's there (chuckles).
And the other thing people don't understand is
that we don't have state subpoena power.
I'm not a police officer that can for somebody
that I can bring him into custody and force an interview.
I'm not a prosecutor that I can issue a subpoena.
People say it's not just about getting Adnan out,
it's about finding the right person,
but I don't have the state power to do that.
That is a responsibility the state.
So definitely, the police drop the ball.
And it's not just that Adnan didn't get justice,
Hae also didn't get justice.
As far as the other thing, how does Serial affect my life?
Well, I have a complete different career.
I'm a podcaster now.
And I four years ago, I didn't know what a podcast was.
There's that.
I worked in national security policy for six years
and I made the decision
that I'm not gonna work in policy anymore
because the impact was too low.
And so I focus the bulk of my work on wrongful conviction,
which I never was an advocate.
I give credit to the people
who've been doing this for decades,
there are people who've been working on these issues
for decades, I only was in it for Adnan.
That's the honest truth.
Now, however, I am very interested in these issues,
in criminal justice reform
and I do still keep a leg in the field of immigration
'cause it's very important to me.
I'm a supervisory attorney at a firm
that handles mostly asylum cases,
especially given the current political climate.
So it's impacted my career almost completely in that way.
For the worse,
I don't know,
I don't think there's been anything that bad come out of it.
I think it's all been good.
I believe in falling opportunities
other than I don't like to travel a lot (chuckles).
So I'm traveling more.
If I could just haul all of my children with me,
we'd be about good, but that doesn't work out.
So that's about it.
Hi, so you mentioned, sorry.
Oh, sorry You mentioned,
sort of the tediousness of and your frustration with like,
sort of the legal system in general.
I mean, the appeals court
not being able to bring in new evidence.
So I was wondering if you have thought about
or had any conversations with other people
about just like comprehensive legal reform?
Yeah, to me as somebody who worked in a policy
and advocacy space like I do think about those issues a lot.
Well, how do you make the changes, right?
And that's question we get a lot,
about what can be done to fix the system?
And the problem is,
what I realized is that a lot of times we wait
for a legislation to fix the system and it, it can work,
but it can also never happen (chuckles)
and a lot of times, it just never happens.
I think the most effective way to reform
for any kind of reform on these issues
that you have to have a whole different animal,
a whole different kind of person in the prosecutor's office.
We've seen this in about three different jurisdictions
around the country now in Houston, in Philadelphia,
and in one district in New York,
where the new district attorneys there
are not career prosecutors.
They are criminal defense attorneys,
who for 20, 30 years prior to Criminal Defense Law,
saw how their defendants have been treated,
sued the police plenty of times,
worked on civil rights stuff and said enough is enough.
I'm gonna go take charge of the house
that's doing this to this community.
Larry Krasner is a phenomenal example out of Philadelphia.
He was a career civil rights and criminal defense attorney,
he said, forget it, I'm running for DA
in a jurisdiction that is historically corrupt,
historically corrupt.
He won and within six months he turned that office around.
He fired prosecutors who committed Brady violations,
which is when a prosecutor withholds evidence of innocence,
actually sits on evidence.
He fired those prosecutors.
He made a list of 26 cops.
He said these cops will never testify
in a case that I prosecute ever again.
Because he knew they were dirty cops.
So now their arrests are useless, right?
He said, I'm not gonna charge marijuana offenses anymore.
He said for the prosecutor that are in my office,
if you're gonna ask for 20 years for like a drug offense,
you have to show me how much every year
is gonna cost the city
and how many teachers we could hire instead,
and what the city could do with money instead.
You have to account for every dollar you want us to spend
to incarcerate this person.
That's the power of one DA and that's what it's about.
It's about electing the right people in office
who will make the change and clean house.
The problem is prosecutors are career prosecutors,
they move on to become judges,
even ones who commit Brady violations.
How many people here watch Making a Murderer?
Do you guys remember the attorney
who represented that young mentally,
I don't want to call him incompetent,
but you know, like I mean Brendan Dasey
was intellectually obviously like affected.
This guy, the attorney who represented him
was so, so incompetent that he set his own client up
to give a confession.
He said this young 16-year-old boy with a low IQ up
to give his own confession.
That guy today is a judge and that's what happens.
So you just need better people in those offices
and that's about electing.
That's just the power of the vote.
Find a criminal defense attorney in your jurisdiction.
Be like well, you've been doing this for 20 years,
run for DA.
Run for DA, get on the other side of that power.
There's a question there.
Hi, thank you for your talk.
My name is Khadija
and I've experienced like direct instances of Islamophobia.
And you briefly mentioned Muslim Americans
learning how to like tell their story.
Do you have any suggestions for how to tell that story?
Yeah, I am heartened to see like kind of a emergence
of American Muslim comedians and artists
and people that we have not seen in those spaces,
athletes on a national level,
and Olympians and all those things.
You have to use the tools at your disposal obviously.
I think art is a wonderful way.
I think filmmaking is a wonderful way.
I think social media, anybody can pop anything on YouTube.
But I also think there's a time and place,
and I think this is the time and a place,
for American Muslims who want to change the narrative
to stop talking about Islam and Muslims.
Part of the problem is the only time we're in the limelight
is when we're being asked to respond to an act of terrorism.
Every time there's an act of terrorism,
any part of the world, Paris, wherever,
like they'll call one of us and say,
do you have anything to say?
What am I supposed to say?
I'm a Pakistani American,
I don't know what happened in Egypt.
Like I don't know what you want from me, right?
Stop being that person
and say I'm actually here to talk about climate change.
I'm here to talk about wrongfully convicted people,
I don't care what their background is.
I'm here to talk about fitness.
I'm here, you know what I mean?
Representing ourselves in other capacities
so people understand we are doing all kinds of things
in this country we're not just here
connected only to our identity like as Muslims.
So I think those things are important.
I want to turn on TV
and when I see a Muslim on a news panel,
I want it to be not about terrorism.
I want it to be 'cause they're there to talk about,
I don't know, raising pets or whatever.
My dad's a veterinarian, I don't know.
Just anything, talk about anything but terrorism.
I think that's one way to do it.
Hi, thank you so much for your talk.
As someone who enjoys watching True Crime documentaries
or podcasts like Serial, I always wondered
well, it seems like there's a very thin line
between making a sensation out of a very tragic story
and making the story convincing enough like you said,
and that could give you a lot of power.
And as someone who's been in the shoes of the families,
or friends of someone was wrongfully convicted
and also as a storyteller now,
what do you think Serial did well in that storytelling
and what do you think went differently
in that process of storytelling
that could have been, I guess,
more respectful for the family members,
both the defenders and the victims and for the process?
Thank you. So you know one of the,
one of the things Serial did incredibly well,
they are professional storytellers was to hook people in,
hook people in with the kind of sustained ambivalence,
the mystery, every week of did he do it did he not.
Earlier tonight, I'm sorry I forgot your name,
this lady over here told me,
yeah, it said that she was hooked from the very first line
where they framed it.
Do you remember what you did six weeks ago?
Right, do you remember that?
Do you remember what you did six weeks ago?
Now the interesting thing about that,
you talk about what they could have done better
was to actually be accurate.
(attendees laughing) The problem with (chuckles)
The problem with that framing which served us
to the extent that it hooked people
was that it was not accurate.
It wasn't that Adnan didn't remember
what he did six weeks ago, it's that he couldn't prove it.
In the police files and in the defense files
that Sarah Koenig had, that I had given to her,
on at least three different occasions,
three different occasions,
Adnan has written down what he did after school that day,
what his schedule was.
It's not that he didn't remember, he just couldn't prove it.
What he couldn't say for sure was,
he's like I was definitely on the school campus that day.
He couldn't tell you if he was in that hallway or that
but he's like I was there
and I went to track practice that day, I remember that.
It was Ramadan, he's like I was fasting.
He led prayers the next day.
Even though it was a great way to hook people,
it was a great tool, narrative tool,
which actually wasn't accurate.
So for me, like that was kind of my beef with Serial,
it's just not getting things completely right.
And I think sometimes they did that for the narrative value
and also because they tried harder than they needed to,
to not be biased, right?
But I also wonder about that when it comes to journalism
and storytelling.
I mean, is it an obligation not to be biased.
Don't we sometimes have to take a side?
And I think there's lots of journalists who have taken sides
and very courageously so on lots of different issues
and been right about it.
So that's what they could have done a little bit better,
I think is just gotten some of the stuff right obviously,
doing the coverage of the autopsy.
One of the things they didn't do and they probably weren't,
and a lot of people criticize them for this
and I didn't agree with the criticism was that
they didn't cover the issue
of being an American Muslim very well,
like in terms of our traditions
and how the community operated
and the the kinds of the double life issue,
all these things,
I just don't think they were equipped to do that, right?
They did not understand our community
and I'm kind of glad they didn't try to do that
because they probably would not have done it well.
So that was a criticism of,
and I'm forever going to be grateful to Sarah Koenig.
There was also, I remember,
a piece written about Sarah Koenig,
as kind of like this great white hope walking in
and taking over the story about this community.
And my response to that piece was,
well we were waiting for the great brown hope
that didn't show up.
So I will take hope in every color, I don't care.
Like that's not my issue.
My issue was just getting the reporting right.
Thank you so much for your talk.
I'm wondering if you have an idea
about why so many prosecutors and cops
are systematically trying to coerce witnesses
or push the ruling in one way.
I'm wondering if you think
that's purely an issue of racism, Islamophobia etc,
or is there something else to it?
Is it just like a larger issue that affects like every race?
And I'm also wondering how Adnan is doing,
having suffered 20 years of injustice
and if he's has been able to maintain
his sanity through the process.
Okay, look, there's no question anybody who understands
and really has looked at the studies
and research around criminal justice, sentencing,
conviction, charging,
that people of color are disproportionately charged
than white people, they just are.
They have 10% longer sentences.
They are charged for things
that are crimes in their neighborhoods,
but not crimes in other neighborhood.
I'll give you an example.
In downtown Baltimore, loitering is a crime.
You hang out on the corner a little too long,
you can be arrested for that.
That's not gonna happen to you
in the suburb where I live, right?
So we have, and this is systematic,
we have criminalized behavior
that's particular to certain communities
that we know it's only gonna impact a certain community.
I was part of a conversation actually.
I do a lot of Jewish-Muslim interfaith work
and some of the things we're trying to do
is bolster hate crime laws against Jews
and Muslims in America especially last couple years
by enacting a domestic terrorism statute.
The problem is this, terrorism under the law
is only terrorism if it is inspired by foreign actors
or committed by a foreign actor.
The law is set up
so that a person who is a white nationalist
can do the exact same thing
that like a brown person from overseas,
or somebody who's inspired by people overseas does
as a Muslim, but not be charged with terrorism.
He's just not gonna get the charge.
So when you have laws that are set up in a way
that impact one community or the other you have issues.
Having said that, when it comes to prosecutors
and so those things have to be addressed and changed,
but when you have prosecutors and cops I have to say this
because I don't want to make it seem
like I'm vilifying all of them,
there are wonderful ethical prosecutors,
there are great people who are cops every day,
who put their life on the line,
what happens often is this,
there will be a couple of bad apples.
But the problem is, everybody else looks away.
Others know it, others know it.
In Baltimore just couple years ago,
this entire task force was known to plant evidence
and like steel drug money from busts that they took.
Like everybody knew but nobody said anything, right?
So the problem is complicity.
But you know what,
and I was telling some students earlier today,
that California is the only state in the entire country
that has finally made it a crime
for a prosecutor to withhold evidence of innocence.
In every other state, a prosecutor can have a videotape
of somebody else committing the crime
and sit on that evidence and not be prosecuted for it.
So California is the only state that's made it a felony
but here's the problem,
nobody's been prosecuted under that law.
What prosecutor is going to charge another prosecutor?
What cop is gonna arrest another cop?
These are the problems that we encounter,
this band of brothers-ship type of thing,
where the system protects itself.
And once again, to me the best answer is to get in people
who are from outside the system who don't give a crap
about those loyalties, who are just there to clean house.
And they're the ones who can kind of shake things up.
Oh, and finally, how is Adnan?
I think Oh yes, how's Adnan?
That was her second question.
Adnan is well.
Adnan is always better than the rest of us (chuckles).
Because Adnan,
like almost every other wrongfully convicted person
I've worked with who has been incarcerated,
he's been in a supermax facility for nine years,
since 2009, excuse me.
Yeah, nine, 10 years now.
But anybody who has life sentences,
like when people listen to him,
they're like, he is way too calm, he must be a psychopath.
You have to understand
when you have been incarcerated for life,
you have to come to terms with it.
You have to create a life.
You have to find some center.
You cannot 20 years later be raging.
You have to find some forgiveness and some clarity
about okay well maybe this is what my life is gonna be like.
And what Adnan says to me today is this,
every time the state files an appeal,
I'm like I'm gonna burn something down
and he says to me know what Rabia,
he's like five years ago I had come to terms
that I'm gonna die in prison.
I'm not gonna leave these (sobs)
that I'm not gonna leave this prison until I'm dead.
He's like now I have a ray of hope.
So that's all he wants
is that the little bit of hope.
And I'm sorry, even after all these years,
I'm tired of the fight you know,
but he's generally doing well
and he doesn't even have the kind of same rage
and hate that I do for like everybody involved.
Like I want to get everybody disbarred
and arrested (chuckles) and I might,
but he's well, he's well.
And he spends most of his time asking how are you doing?
He's like I'm good, I'm okay, don't worry about me so.
Anyhow, so thank you for that question.
And sorry for the tears, it's been a long day (chuckles).
Thank you for sharing your story
as well as Adnan's story.
Please join me in thanking Miss Rabia Chaudry.
(attendees applause) Thank you.
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