Rabia Chaudry: “It’s almost always about poor investigations.”
Attorney and Undisclosed pod co-producer Rabia Chaudry on how and why wrongful convictions happen and the case of Adnan Syed
Rabia Chaudry is an immigration and civil rights lawyer who’s been working on justice issues for her entire career, but whose work became very public with the broadcast of Serial, the investigative journalism podcast that launched with the story of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore high school student who was murdered in 1999, and Adnan Syed, a classmate who was accused of killing her. Chaudry’s younger brother was a friend of Syed’s, and Chaudry, who believes he was wrongfully convicted, became an advocate for him and eventually took his story to journalist Sarah Koenig, who hosted and produced the Peabody Award-winning podcast.
This month, HBO Documentaries released a documentary series about Adnan’s case called “The Case Against Adnan Syed” that further explores the circumstances and evidence surrounding Hae Min Lee’s murder. You can also read Chaudry’s account of the case in her book Adnan’s Story, available here.
Chaudry is also the co-founder of the Undisclosed podcast, which launched in 2015, and examines wrongful conviction cases. “We have three slated for this year,” said Chaudry, when we spoke in February, “and these are all cases where we’re not just reporting on them, we actually work with the lawyers. We work with the defendants. We’re doing actual investigations, going back, looking at new evidence and trying to actually get them in court.”
Chaudry, who is a 2016 Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at U.S. Institute of Peace and an expert on the intersection of religion and violent extremism, has a broad body of civil rights work. New Yorkers for Justice spoke to Chaudry specifically about her work on wrongful conviction cases, what’s new in Adnan Syed’s case, and what we can do to ensure that everyone wrongful convictions don’t happen in the first place.
NY4J: How did you end up working on wrongful conviction cases?
Rabia Chaudry: Everything related to Serial and Undisclosed kind of had nothing to do with my career. I’m an attorney and I began, when I was in law school I began working in immigration with refugee and asylum stuff, but my practice was immigration. And then after 9/11 there was a lot of nexus between immigration and civil rights, so I was doing immigration and civil rights work. That kind of morphed into other things all related to those issues, so immigration, civil rights, national security. We can see it even today when we talk about politics and how immigration was used to serve national security purposes.
So I began working in national security policy and the bulk of my career are those three issues, but when the criminal justice stuff comes in, that’s really about Adnan’s case. It was never a professional pursuit, that was a personal endeavor. Adnan was somebody I’d known since he was 13 years old. He’s my younger brother’s best friend, and I have been trying to help him and his family for 20 years now, get him a fair shake in court. I believe he was wrongly convicted.
And Serial happened because I knew we were going to lose the one big appeal we’d been preparing for and I just didn’t know what else to do. And that kind of has morphed into a whole other career in a way because of Undisclosed pod. It’s almost full-time work, as we’re investigating not just Adnan’s case, but trying to help other wrongfully convicted people as well.
Of the cases that you’ve looked at, are you noticing any kind of systemic patterns for why people get wrongfully convicted? Things that at the 30,000 foot level are just broken?
Yeah, definitely. You see very common red flags. And a lot of them are related to very poor investigations. A lot of times you’ll see, in any given jurisdiction, the same officer’s names pop up over and over again because they have fallen into a practice of poorly investigating cases. So it’s almost always about poor investigations. Often times there’ll be only one suspect that the police focus on very early on in the investigation. They don’t look at any other evidence. There will be eyewitness evidence or jailhouse informant evidence versus actual forensic evidence. Almost always in these cases there are never forensics tying these people to the crime. It’s always eyewitness.
And these witnesses can either be just wrong because they identify people incorrectly, or in many cases they’re forced or coerced by the police to do so. And you have jailhouse informants who have other incentives to offer testimony.
You’ll see prosecutors holding evidence. There might be interview or alibi witnesses they’ve contacted or some other kind of evidence that will help exonerate the defendant, but they won’t turn it over. It’s called a Brady violation, and it’s very common.
And you know, Adnan’s case was the first one that I’ve ever been involved in. And then when I started looking at others, you know what to look out for and it jumps out at you.
How are you finding the cases that you’re covering? Are they coming to you?
Yeah, they almost always come to us. There’s been a couple of cases, maybe two or three, where we’ve read something in real life and it’s something that we could look into or potentially help with, so we’ll reach out. But 90% of our cases come to us and then we have to decide based on a couple of different factors whether or not we should take the case. First, is is there actually room to do anything? Has every investigative lead been exhausted? Is there any other thing we can do in court? For some people they’ve exhausted every appeal and there’s almost nothing we can do at that point.
Secondly, do they have investigator already working the case? Do they have other resources so we could be used somewhere a person doesn’t? And third: are the defendant and the lawyers all on board? Because we can’t do this without them giving permission.
And then finally, you want audio. It ‘s a podcast, so you’ve need either file audio or interrogation audio, and also the ability to interview the defendant themselves.
What role do you think prosecutors and D.A.’s play in these situations where people are getting wrongfully convicted?
Prosecutors and D.A.’s are the most powerful people in the system. Everything — that’s where the buck stops, and that’s where criminal justice reform has to start. Look at Philadelphia. Larry Krasner had a very high profile election there, very progressive. He’s not a career prosecutor. He’s a clear criminal defense attorney, and he came in and really just turned the system on its head within the first six months, and continues to do so. And that’s because prosecutors have the most power. They can decide who to charge.
Prosecutors and D.A.’s are the most powerful people in the system. Everything — that’s where the buck stops, and that’s where criminal justice reform has to start.
The police can bring forward a case, but the prosecutor decides whether or not to proceed with those charges. Everything that the defense gets comes to the prosecutor’s office and they decide what evidence to give them, or not give them.
I’ll give you an example: in Adnan’s case — and this wasn’t even evidence that was just primarily in the prosecutor’s hands — Adnan’s lawyer repeatedly requested the autopsy report from the medical exam, and the medical examiner wouldn’t give her the autopsy report because the prosecutor had told him not to. This is how prosecutors can hamstring a defense. How are you even supposed to defend somebody blind like that? You don’t know the time of death. You don’t know how the person was killed. You don’t know the state’s theory of the case. You don’t have the witness names. The prosecutor won’t turn over the names of the witnesses, so they don’t even know who’s testifying against Adnan. This is very common. So how do you defend someone? How do you prepare for trial?
In the cases you’re covering on the pod where they don’t really have a lot of evidence or it seems very weak, what do you think are the structural incentives for prosecutors to push through and bring those cases to trial anyway?
Well, there’s always incentive for prosecutors to get convictions. These are career builders. Many times prosecutors become judges or they run for other kinds of elected office. Depending on the case, there might be a lot of media attention or community pressure to close a case. But having open cases is never good for a police chief or a prosecutor, so they want to get their convictions.
And I have heard prosecutors say, we proceed with the cases where we are most likely to get the conviction. That’s different than proceeding with cases where they’re most likely to get the right person.
And I have heard prosecutors say, we proceed with the cases where we are most likely to get the conviction. That’s different than proceeding with cases where they’re most likely to get the right person.
At the end of the day it’s all about who tells the better story for the jury. And juries are made up of human beings that come with their biases, and many of them really trust the state, you know, the victim’s family is trusting the state. Everybody’s trusting the system and then often in many cases, the defendant, whether or not he maintains his innocence, will never testify because lawyers won’t let their clients testify. And I get that — they don’t want to put even an innocent person on the stand because it’s so easy to hurt your case and come across as confused, or unsure, or too emotional or not emotional enough. And then the net result of that is, well, he never took the stand, so that makes him look bad, period. You’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
For people who have been wrongfully convicted, I realize you’re probably not meeting them right after that happens, but as a lawyer, what do you advise your client to do in the case of wrongful conviction? What recourse do people have?
In the immediate wake of a wrongful conviction, the most important thing is to first make sure you have all the records. Make sure you or a family member have all of documentation in the file, but you also have to continue the investigation, to get a private investigator to say, these are the people nobody talked to. These are people you can talk to again. You continue to collect evidence, basically. That’s what you need to do.
Because what’ll happen is we’ll have cases come to us fifteen, twenty years later. Witness die, they forget. You have to look at whatever happened at the trial and where the gaps were in your defense, and say, how do I fill in those gaps as quickly as possible?
Even if you found a witness who can say this person’s definitely innocent or I saw somebody else kill them, or you have videotape, you might not be able to immediately present that in a court. But you’ve got to have nailed down that evidence so you have it by the time you present it.
What’s the longterm vision for Undisclosed Pod? What do you want to accomplish with it?
We never had a longterm vision. We were just going to do Adnan’s case and be done, and then the requests kept coming in. And right now every one of the clients we work with, their cases are meaningful to us and we continue to stay in contact, and follow the case through the court, and do what we can.
I don’t know how many years we’re going to continue to do this. It’s very hard to walk away when there’s more people there, so our vision is year to year. This year we can cover this many cases, but at the end of the day what we want is, whether it’s five years after we covered a case, or eight years, or whatever, that we actually still stick with these cases and see them through to the end. Our only vision is not to walk away from any of these defendants.
What were your expectations with Adnan’s case, when you took this story to the people who ended up producing Serial?
It wasn’t even about getting any attention publicly because I personally don’t really believe a story getting out has impact inside the courts. What I was hoping was that Sarah Koenig, as a journalist, would be able to find evidence that we couldn’t find. She’d be able to talk to people we can’t talk to. When you’re lawyers, you’re very close to defendants, and you have these ethical boundaries. I can’t be running down witness myself and looking for evidence myself because at the end of the day, that could be construed as me putting pressure on a witness or them feeling intimidate. You have to have a real neutral third party.
And I just think journalists are good at getting people to talk. So I thought what I wanted from Sarah Koenig was just to find us the witness or the evidence that could just get us back and forth, get us a new trial. That’s all I wanted.
So what’s happening now?
So much. His conviction has been overturned twice in the last four years, and every time it’s overturned, the state appeals it. They filed a third appeal last year and we had the hearing on it, and this is basically the last appeal. They keep losing, but they can’t appeal it anymore. This is like the final appeal for them because it’s in the highest court in Maryland.
We’re waiting for them to — the court to rule.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: the Maryland court ruled on March 8 that Adnan would not receive a new trial.]
This is what we expect. They fight tooth and nail to keep a conviction. We knew it was going to happen. It’s for a lot of different reasons. It can be because it’s embarrassing to have it overturned, but I’ll give you another example: in Adnan’s case, one of the reasons his conviction got overturned was because one of the judges said that the cell tower evidence was not properly interrogated by his defense attorney That’s why his defense counsel failed at her job.
Now, if that ruling stands, what that means is all the other defendants in Maryland that have a similar issue can now on the basis of that ruling, file their own appeals and say wait a minute, in this case a conviction got overturned, and in my case, the same thing happened. And so the state can expect lots of new challenges, based on these kind of rulings.
So for them to keep the conviction means it’s also less work because they’re expecting to get slammed with a lot of new cases if we win.
So for people who are interested in the problem of wrongful convictions or working on justice issues but aren’t legal professionals, how do you suggest that people get involved? People who are not really in the field but care about these issues?
There are lots of people working in these spaces that are not lawyers and they’re not legal professionals in any capacity. But there are people in organizations that have been doing this work for decades. It just never was sexy work, so I would say the first thing you want to do is take a look at your state and your region to see what organizations are doing with wrongful conviction work. There are lots of social media forums in which, for example, where the loved ones of a person are posting and saying, you know, I’m looking for justice for this person. You can independently start working with a family to try to help them. You can go through case files or do similar investigations.
But one of the easiest ways is really to support the work of local Innocence Projects and other organizations doing the work. We’ve done a number of cases with the Georgia Innocence Project, and when we first started working with them, they were working out of one room that was like next to a nail salon. They had no staff attorney, no resources, and in the last few years thanks to listeners, they finally have a proper office space. They have a couple of attorneys on staff. They’ve gotten the funding to actually do the work properly. A lot of these organizations are severely understaffed, under budgeted, and they can use volunteers. You don’t have to be a lawyer to do that.
And so I would tell people to support the work of the people who are already doing it and then ask them, what do you need on the local level?
And the second thing that’s most important is all the power is with the district attorney. If people just take a quick look at who the district attorney is — who, in their jurisdiction — how long has that person been in that position? I can promise you across this country, in most places the same D.A. will run over and over and over, and keep getting elected because nobody’s opposing them.
And in the election, they’ll be the only one running. Well, change that. Change that! You’ve gotta have the right people in those positions and you will make the biggest difference by electing the right people to those positions.
I can promise you across this country, in most places the same D.A. will run over and over and over, and keep getting elected because nobody’s opposing them. And in the election, they’ll be the only one running. Well, change that. Change that!
What are some wins you think you guys have had in the last year or two with the pod? Are there specific cases that you feel really good about?
With Adnan’s case, there are wins. Even though he’s still in prison, getting his conviction overturned twice, these were huge wins. Even having a huge public debate about his innocence or guilt, that’s a win, right? And we’re moving in the right direction.
There are a couple of cases out of Philadelphia. In one case we began the investigation, and when the Pennsylvania Innocence Project we were working with told the district attorney that we were working on this and we’d started investigating and we were going to start reporting on it, they actually offered him a plea deal. He walked.
Shaurn Thomas walked before we even got to report, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that the D.A. knew that this guy’s innocent. They had no intention until then to do that.
Another case, again out of the same office, Chester Hollman, also we understand might be close to getting some kind of relief from the D.A. — like, them actually letting him go. We did a series on Chester Hollman’s case. And we learned that when the district attorney’s office gets new interns now, part of their internship orientation is to listen to our season of Undisclosed on Chester Hollman.
And that’s a big deal. That’s a big deal because they’re showing their interns that this is how your office f’ed this up. It was their office that handled that case. So these are wins.
We have a couple other cases. Ronnie Long, who I think has a new hearing in court, Joey Watkins, we fought a habeas for him. It didn’t fly, but we’re not done with it. As long as you can get some movement in court, some life in a case, it’s a win.
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