Wednesday hearing will be Syed’s last chance to prove he’s innocent in the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee – and the first time the world has seen him post-Serial

Adnan Syed’s mother stood in the middle of a room in the basement of the Dar Al Taqwa Islamic center near Baltimore.

“I haven’t seen her smile like this in a very long time,” said Kasif Ali, a lifelong friend of the Syed family. He said that when Yusef, Adnan’s brother, let his mother Shamim Syed see all the Facebook posts from around the world, she was overwhelmed and stayed up half the night reading them. And now, as the basement room fills up with television cameras and well-wishers wearing #FreeAdnan T-shirts who came to pray and mobilize before Syed’s hearing, Shamim Syed is both excited and nervous.

Syed was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999. On Wednesday, he will receive another chance to argue his innocence, after he was granted a hearing to consider new evidence.

Millions of people around the world became familiar, if not obsessed, with Syed’s case when it became the subject of Serial, a podcast spinoff of the public radio hit This American Life. Sarah Koenig, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, spent 12 weeks digging into the details of the crime, its investigation and the trial that has kept Syed, who has always insisted on his innocence, behind bars for the past 17 years.

“My brother was broken and alone,” said Yusef Syed. “Then came Serial.”

The hearing this week will be Syed’s last chance – and the first time the world has seen him post-Serial.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adnan Syed enters the courthouse in Baltimore prior to a hearing on Wednesday. It is his first public appearance since the Serial podcast aired. Photograph: Barbara Haddock Taylor/AP

“It took a lot to get here,” said Rabia Chaudry, a lawyer and friend of the family who first took the case to Koenig, the producer and narrator of Serial. “It’s not the appeals process that brought us here. We lost the appeal.”

She said that only 1.2% of cases receive leave to appeal the denial of post-conviction, the technical name for Syed’s hearing.

But Syed’s supporters think the case is stronger now. New evidence can’t be introduced in appeals, so this post-conviction remedy is the first chance Syed’s team has had to present new evidence, which they say could dramatically change the case and lead to Syed’s freedom.

The first issue is that of a witness, Asia McClain, who has maintained that she was with Syed when the murder took place and said that she was pressured not to testify by the prosecution. The second issue involves the use of incoming calls to a cellphone to determine location – a new technology at the time which Justin Brown, Syed’s lawyer, says should not have been admitted.

“It’s our position that the alibi issue all by itself is an issue strong enough to win a reversal of Adnan’s conviction,” Brown said. “But also the cell tower evidence even by itself is also strong enough to merit his sentence being vacated.”

Brown maintains that Syed’s original attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, who was disbarred the following year, provided ineffective counsel in Syed’s original trial in 2000.

The state’s case was based primarily on the testimony of Jay Wilds, Syed’s friend and pot dealer, who testified that Syed showed him Min Lee’s body in the trunk of a car and coerced him into helping bury her in Baltimore’s Leakin park, where numerous other bodies have been hidden over the years.

This testimony was bolstered by cellphone records which seemed to place Syed at the scene of the crime. But the new evidence, a cover letter to a fax sent by service provider AT&T, casts doubt on that. “Outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information,” the letter reads.

Without those records, the defense maintains there is little to corroborate the testimony of Wilds, whose courtroom version of events differed significantly from what he originally told investigators. “The state has been trumpeting that evidence,” said Brown. “That evidence should not have come in at trial. Incoming phone calls should not have been admissible.”

Add to that the new witness – whose testimony is expected to show that she was with Syed at the library when the crime was committed – and Syed’s family and supporters hope that he may finally go free.

Chaudry says that over the past 17 years, the community has raised more than $300,000 for Syed’s defense, but it wasn’t until Koenig and the Serial team tackled the case that it captured the world’s attention.

Though Koenig ended the podcast with doubts – she was never sure, she said, whether Sayed did it or not – Brown acknowledges that Serial has greatly helped Syed’s case. “I felt it was very fortuitous,” he said of the podcast. “It’s helped us a great deal – it’s helped us turn this case around. And it’s put [us in the] position we’re in today.”

Chaudry started her own podcast, Undisclosed, which followed up on Serial and gave internet sleuths a further chance to geek out on the question of whether or not there were pay phones at the Best Buy store near Woodlawn high school in 1999. Another podcast, Truth and Justice, has dealt with the case and its creator Bob Ruff was in the audience of the Islamic Center filming Chaudry’s talk for Periscope as a film crew scurried around.

“People know more about this case and the details of it than probably any other case in US history,” Brown suggested, acknowledging that the case of Steven Avery, the subject of Making a Murderer, Netflix’s new true-crime mega hit, may come close. “One of the positives of it is that it has made a lot of people pay attention to the criminal justice system and some of the injustices that are part of that system. And it’s opened people’s eyes up to the fact that a lot of people are wrongly convicted.”

For Brown, the fact that the court will hear the new evidence shows not that the system is broken, but that the system works. “We are hopeful that at the end of the day this case will prove that the justice system does work,” he said. “Maybe things take a long time. If his conviction is vacated, to me that would show that there’s something right about the justice system. Mistakes were made, but the mistakes were brought to light and the justice system reacted to them.”

There was a lot of talk about the justice system and wrongful convictions at Tuesday’s meeting, which was moved from the Islamic Center of Baltimore where Syed’s family members are congregants, because Barack Obama will visit the mosque – his first visit to a US mosque as president – on Wednesday, the day Syed’s hearings begin.

Some of Syed’s supporters, such as Kashif Ali, think this could be a good sign. “I think he must know about it,” Ali said. “Maybe his daughters listened or something.”

Chaudry said she was on the president’s list of attendees – but even though she says she is an Obama fan, she will be at the court.