Adnan Syed's murder conviction reinstated, new hearing ordered by Maryland Supreme Court

A 2022 court hearing that freed Adnan Syed from prison violated the legal rights of the victim’s family and must be redone, Maryland’s Supreme Court ruled Friday, marking the latest development in the ongoing legal saga that gained global attention years ago through the hit podcast "Serial."

The 4-3 ruling comes nearly a year after the court heard arguments last October in a case that has been fraught with legal twists and divided court rulings since Syed was convicted in 2000 of killing his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee.

The panel of seven judges weighed the extent to which crime victims have a right to participate in hearings where a conviction could be vacated. To that end, the court considered whether to uphold a lower appellate court ruling in 2023 in favor of the Lee family. It reinstated Syed’s murder conviction a year after a judge granted a request from Baltimore prosecutors to vacate it because of flawed evidence.

David Sanford, the Lee family's lawyer, released the following statement Friday: 

"The Maryland Supreme Court today definitively reaffirms crime victims’ rights to be treated with dignity, respect and sensitivity, rights enshrined in the Maryland State Constitution. The Supreme Court acknowledges what Hae Min Lee‘s family has argued: crime victims have a right to be heard in court. In this case, that means the family of murder victim Hae Min Lee had the right to reasonable notice in order to attend and meaningfully participate in the criminal justice proceedings involving Adnan Syed, the person accused and convicted of Lee’s murder. Significantly, the Lee family will now have the right to address the merits of the vacatur motion after the prosecution and the defense have made their presentations in support of that motion. If there is compelling evidence to support vacating the conviction of Adnan Syed, we will be the first to agree.  To date, the public has not seen evidence which would warrant overturning a murder conviction that has withstood appeals for over two decades. The burden remains on the prosecution and the defense to make their case. So far, they have not done so."

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Syed, 43, has maintained his innocence and has often expressed concern for Lee’s surviving relatives. The teenage girl was found strangled to death and buried in an unmarked grave in 1999. Syed was sentenced to life in prison, plus 30 years.

Syed was released from prison in September 2022, when a Baltimore judge overturned his conviction after city prosecutors found flaws in the evidence.

However, in March 2023, the Appellate Court of Maryland, the state’s intermediate appellate court, ordered a redo of the hearing that won Syed his freedom and reinstated his conviction. The court said the victim’s family didn’t receive adequate notice to attend the hearing in person, violating their right under state law to be "treated with dignity and respect."

Syed’s lawyer Erica Suter has argued that the state did meet its obligation by allowing Lee’s brother Young Lee to participate in the hearing via video conference.

Syed appealed his conviction’s reinstatement, and the Lee family also appealed to the state’s highest court, contending that crime victims should be given a larger role in the process of vacating a conviction.

Syed has remained free as the latest set of appeals wind their way through the state court system.

During oral arguments last year, his attorneys argued the Lee family’s appeal was moot because prosecutors decided not to charge him again after his conviction was vacated. And even if her brother’s rights were violated, the attorneys argued, he hasn’t demonstrated whether the alleged violation would have changed the outcome of the hearing.

This wasn’t the first time Maryland’s highest court has taken up Syed’s protracted legal odyssey.

In 2019, a divided court ruled 4-3 to deny Syed a new trial. A lower court had ordered a retrial in 2016 on grounds that Syed’s attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, didn’t contact an alibi witness and provided ineffective counsel. Gutierrez died in 2004.

In November 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision by Maryland’s top court.

More recently, Baltimore prosecutors reexamined Syed’s files under a Maryland law targeting so-called "juvenile lifers" because he was 17 when Hae Min Lee’s body was found. Prosecutors uncovered numerous problems, including alternative suspects and the unreliable evidence presented at trial.

Instead of reconsidering his sentence, prosecutors filed a motion to vacate Syed’s conviction entirely. They later chose not to recharge him after receiving the results of DNA testing that was conducted using more modern testing techniques than initially conducted. DNA recovered from Lee’s shoes excluded Syed as a suspect, prosecutors said.

Syed’s case was chronicled in the "Serial" podcast, which debuted in 2014 and drew millions of listeners who became armchair detectives as the series analyzed the case. The show transformed the true-crime genre as it shattered podcast-streaming and downloading records, revealing little-known evidence and raising new questions about the case.