AG: 2 say alibi witness in 'Serial' case said she would lie

ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- An alibi witness for a man whose murder conviction was re-examined in the popular "Serial" podcast told two classmates she would lie to help him, the Maryland attorney general's office wrote in court filings Monday.

Officials wrote two sisters who were classmates of the witness at Woodlawn High School approached the attorney general's office this summer, after a judge ordered a new trial for Adnan Syed. The sisters gave sworn statements saying they got into a 1999 argument with the witness, Asia McClain, who has said she saw Syed at the Woodlawn library about the same time Hae Min Lee was murdered and buried in a shallow grave in a Baltimore park that year.

Syed was convicted in 2000 of murdering Lee. He was sentenced to life in prison.

One of the classmates sent an unsolicited email to the attorney general's office July 7, a week after the judge ordered the new trial.

The woman, who is not identified in court papers, wrote she initially planned to stay out of the case because she didn't think Syed would be granted a new trial.

"I very much remember, as does (my sister), having a conversation with Asia in our co-op class about Asia saying she believed so much in Adnan's innocence, she would make up a lie to prove he couldn't have done it," she wrote.

The attorney general's office is asking the sisters' affidavits be used in court if McClain's alibi claim is introduced.

In his ruling this summer for a new trial, now-retired Baltimore Circuit Judge Martin Welch said he disagreed Syed's lawyer erred when she failed to contact McClain. He ruled Syed's lawyers were deficient because they failed to note the unreliability of cellphone-tracking evidence cited by prosecutors to place Syed's phone near the site where Lee was buried.