Sarah Koenig and the rest of the "Serial" podcast team surprised fans Thursday when they announced that they would be releasing three mini-episode updates regarding Season 1 subject Adnan Syed as he seeks a new trail for the murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee.
In the second of three Season 1 "Serial" updates from Syed's post-conviction hearing, star witness Asia McClain, who was a former classmate of Syed's, testified for the second day in a row, according to The Chicago Tribune. During Syed's 2000 trial where he was convicted of murder, his lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, did not call McClain up to the witness stand, even though she claimed to see Syed when he was supposedly killing Lee.
When Syed was arrested back in 1999 for the murder of Lee, McClain wrote letters to Syed and claimed that she remembered talking to him in at the library when the murder was said to take place. While McClain said that she had an alibi for Syed, the state poked holes in her statement, and even Koenig sounded skeptical of the alibi.
During Thursday's trial, a detective from the original case got on the witness stand and brought up an old interview with one of Syed's friends named Ja'uan Gordon, who told police that he instructed a girl to write a letter for him, according to the New York Daily News.
While McClain's testimony could have been a game changer for Syed, the hearing was more concentrated on the cell phone records. Syed's defense team claimed that cell phone tower records, which later became evidence against Syed, were unreliable back in 1999. The defense said that the records included a fax from AT&T that said incoming calls were not a reliable way to determine a user's location, according to The Baltimore Sun.
Listen to Season 1 update, episode 2 here.
