Thiruvendran "Thiru" Vignarajah (born December 18, 1976) is an American lawyer and politician. He previously was Deputy Attorney General of Maryland. He is a litigation partner at the law firm DLA Piper in Baltimore. He has also been the lead attorney for the State of Maryland in the post-conviction appeals of Adnan Syed, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in the high-profile 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee. He has run for Baltimore City attorney twice, and also for Mayor. He was defeated in the primary each time.
Education
Vignarajah, the son of immigrants from Sri Lanka, graduated from Woodlawn High School in Baltimore, Maryland. His sister is Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, now president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration Services. He studied at Yale College where he received degrees in Political Science and Philosophy, before earning a master's degree in Medical Ethics at King's College London. He then joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company before attending Harvard Law School. He was elected President of the Harvard Law Review and was responsible for leading a push for addressing the gender disparity in law review admissions. While at Harvard, Vignarajah was also a research assistant for Derek Bok, the former President of Harvard University, and Arthur R. Miller.
Legal career
After law school, Vignarajah clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi, a federal appellate judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and for Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States from 2006 to 2007. Following his clerkships, Vignarajah practiced at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., before serving as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Maryland, under Rod J. Rosenstein, and then as Chief of the Major Investigations Unit at the State's Attorney's Office for Baltimore City. In 2015, Vignarajah was named Deputy Attorney General for the State of Maryland.
As Deputy Attorney General, Vignarajah was the lead author of statewide guidelines issued by the Maryland Attorney General to end discriminatory profiling by police, making Maryland the first state to answer former Attorney General Eric Holder's call for states to issue guidelines on profiling.
As a prosecutor, Vignarajah handled a number of notable cases in Maryland. He was responsible for prosecuting, among others, the alleged mastermind of a series of armed robberies that resulted in the murder of a Greek businessman in Baltimore; a former nonprofit board director who allegedly set a row home on fire with his mistress and her five-year-old son sleeping inside; and two alleged members of the Black Guerrilla Family who killed a 12-year-old boy and shot three other teenagers.
Vignarajah has taught constitutional law, administrative law, and law and education as a member of the adjunct faculty at the University of Baltimore School of Law and the University of Maryland School of Law. He also teaches a course on crime policy at Johns Hopkins University.
Killing of Hae Min Lee
The first season of the podcast Serial focused attention on the 1999 killing of Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee. A high school classmate, Adnan Syed, was convicted of her murder in 2000. Vignarajah has handled multiple appeals filed by Syed's legal team. On March 29, 2018, Maryland's Court of Special Appeals upheld a ruling that Syed was entitled to a new trial. On May 14, 2018, Vignarajah appealed the ruling. On March 8, 2019, Maryland's Court of Appeals overturned the ruling and reinstated Syed's original conviction.
Recorded sharing of nonpublic information
While serving as Deputy Attorney General of Maryland, Vignarajah was covertly filmed by conservative political activist James O'Keefe for his organization, Project Veritas. Vignarajah was filmed in a hotel room giving a female Project Veritas reporter information about plans to side with the Environmental Protection Agency against Maryland Governor Hogan. The plan had not yet been announced to the public. A spokesperson for Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said that “No protected or confidential information was revealed in any discussions." Ivan Bates, who at the time was running against Vignarajah, said that Vignarajah was "relaying this sensitive material to impress this young lady."