Serial's Adnan Syed is getting a new trial

Adnan Syed will get a new trial.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Carlos Barria)

On Thursday, Judge Martin Welch vacated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the Baltimore man at the center of the first season of the wildly popular true-crime podcast Serial, and granted him a new trial. Syed's attorneys tweeted Thursday that Syed had won a new trial after a Baltimore judge ruled that his original attorney failed to properly cross-examine incriminating cell-tower evidence.

Syed's current defense team successfully re-opened post conviction hearings this past February and in March filed a post-hearing motion to add new evidence to the record, partially due to the popularity of and unearthed information from Serial. Syed is currently serving a life sentence plus 30 years after being convicted in 2000 of murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee while they were both seniors at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore.

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Kimberly Alters

Kimberly Alters is the news editor at TheWeek.com. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.