Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Defense Diaries.

I'm your host Bob Mata, and today is September 20th, 2022.

Now we just dropped our inaugural episode of Sidebar on the 19th of September, which covered

the bombshell motion to vacate the conviction of Adnan Sayed.

Now at the time that that first episode was recorded, we were unaware of what date

that the hearing on that motion was going to be heard.

And much to our surprise and delight, it was heard on Monday, September 19th of 2022,

in front of Judge Melissa Finn in the Baltimore City Circuit Court.

So yeah, that was yesterday.

Now we here at Defense Diaries were completely unaware of the hearing being set until

we saw a tweet from Rabia Shadri, who has been a tireless advocate of Adnan since the

day he had been convicted.

Her podcast undisclosed has been instrumental in shedding light and continuing to apply

pressure to the state of Maryland, as well as the prosecutor's office of the city of Baltimore.

So we here at Defense Diaries want to give a huge, huge shout out to Rabia and give her

massive props, and everyone else who has advocated on behalf of Adnan for the past 23 years

because without what they have done, what happened yesterday would never have happened.

So let's dig into what actually took place yesterday.

So at approximately 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Judge Finn called the case to order.

Unfortunately, there was no live stream, but a guy named Lee Sanderlin, who's a crime

beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun, performed a masterclass of live tweeting and gave

all of us that were desperate to hear what was going on in the courtroom, the blow by

...