Month: October 2022

On Tuesday, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to reject former President Donald Trump’s request to allow the special master reviewing documents seized from Mar-a-Lago access to those marked as classified. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in court papers that Trump would suffer “no harm at all” if the documents are temporarily withheld from the special master.

Whatever the court decides will not affect the Justice Department’s access to the same documents in its criminal investigation. The more than 100 classified documents are just a small portion of the 11,000 records seized by federal agents amid concerns that Trump had unlawfully retained official White House records after leaving office. The Supreme Court is reviewing a Sept. 21 decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that barred the special master, Judge Raymond Dearie, from reviewing the documents. Under federal law, official White House records are federal property and must be handed over to the National Archives when the president leaves office. Trump says he did nothing improper and wants Dearie to determine the status of the documents, including those marked as classified. A decision by the Supreme Court is due at any time.

Trump’s lawyers had said the appeal’s court’s decision to block access to the special master “impairs substantially the ongoing, time-sensitive work of the special master …any limit on the comprehensive and transparent review of materials seized in the extraordinary raid of a president’s home erodes public confidence in our system of justice.”

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On Tuesday, the Baltimore City State Attorney’s Office announced they have dropped all charges against ‘Serial’ podcast subject Adnan Syed for the 1999 murder of his former girlfriend. The move comes weeks after Syed’s conviction was overturned on September 19th, and he was released without bail and placed on home detention with GPS monitoring while prosecutors were given 30 days to decide whether to move for a new trial or drop the case.

Syed was sentenced to life in prison in 2000 for the murder Hae Min Lee; his case gained national attention more than a decade later in 2014 as the subject of the podcast “Serial.” Erica Suter, Syed’s attorney and director of the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore Law School, said: “Finally Syed is able to live as a free man.”  

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender said in a statement that the decision to drop the charges was made after DNA testing “excluded Mr. Syed from the DNA recovered at the scene…the DNA results confirm what we have already known and what underlies all of the current proceedings: that Adnan is innocent and lost 23 years of his life serving time for a crime he did not commit.”

Syed, just 17 years old at the time of his arrest, has maintained his innocence in the killing of the 18-year-old Lee, his classmate and ex-girlfriend, who was strangled to death and found buried in a park in Baltimore County in 1999.  However after a yearlong investigation into the case, prosecutors said they had produced evidence suggesting the involvement of two alternative suspects.   One of the suspects threatened Lee, saying “he would make her disappear” and “would kill her.” and one of the suspects was described as a serial rapist convicted in a series of sexual assaults after Syed’s trial. Police also discovered Lee’s car near one of the suspect’s residences.

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