Adnan Syed, who was freed in September after he spent 23 years in prison fighting a murder conviction that was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” has been hired by Georgetown University as an associate for an organization whose work mirrors the efforts that led to his release, the university has announced.
Syed, the subject of the 2014 podcast and pop-culture sensation that raised questions about whether he had received a fair trial after being convicted of strangling his high school classmate and onetime girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, will work for Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative.
Syed, who was 17 at the time of Lee’s death in Baltimore, has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
The university said Syed, now 41, will help support programs at the organization, such as a class in which students reinvestigate wrongful convictions and seek to “bring innocent people home” by creating short documentaries about their findings. The program, founded in 2016, “brings together leading scholars, practitioners, students and those affected by the criminal justice system to tackle the problem of mass incarceration,” according to its website.
Georgetown University, which is in Washington, said that in the year leading up to his release, Syed was enrolled in the university’s bachelor of liberal arts program at the Maryland prison where he was incarcerated.
“To go from prison to being a Georgetown student and then to actually be on campus on a pathway to work for Georgetown at the Prisons and Justice Initiative, it’s a full circle moment,” Syed said in a statement. “PJI changed my life. It changed my family’s life. Hopefully I can have the same kind of impact on others.”
He added that he hoped to continue his education at Georgetown and go to law school.
In October, prosecutors in Baltimore dropped the charges against Syed after DNA testing on items that had never been fully examined proved Syed’s innocence, officials said.
Lee’s family filed an appeal with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals after prosecutors dropped the charges.
On Nov. 4, the court said in an order that the appeal could be heard in court in February.
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