ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Adnan Syed’s murder conviction still stands after Maryland’s highest court Friday ordered a redo of the hearing that freed him. The court ruled that the earlier proceeding violated the legal rights of the victim’s family, marking the latest development in a legal saga of global interest because of the hit podcast “Serial.”
The 4-3 ruling upheld an appellate court’s decision to reinstate Syed’s conviction. It comes about 11 months 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 justices said that Syed, who was released from prison in 2022, can remain free as the case heads to a new lower court judge to determine whether Syed’s conviction should be tossed. Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates on Friday said his office is reviewing the ruling and declined to comment further.
The court concluded that in an effort to remedy what was perceived to be an injustice to Syed, prosecutors and a lower court “worked an injustice” against Lee’s brother, Young Lee. The court ruled that Lee was not treated with “dignity, respect, and sensitivity,” because he was not given reasonable notice of the hearing that resulted in Syed being freed.
The court also said Lee would be afforded reasonable notice of the new hearing, “sufficient to provide Mr. Lee with a reasonable opportunity to attend such a hearing in person,” and for him or his counsel to be heard.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Michele Hotten argued the issue was moot because the conviction had already been vacated.
“This case exists as a procedural zombie,” Hotten wrote. “It has been reanimated, despite its expiration. The doctrine of mootness was designed to prevent such judicial necromancy.”
The latest issue in the case pitted recent criminal justice reform efforts against the legal rights of crime victims and their families, whose voices are often at odds with a growing movement to acknowledge and correct systemic issues, including historic racism, police misconduct and prosecutorial missteps.
David Sanford, an attorney who represents the victim’s family, said the ruling “acknowledges what Hae Min Lee‘s family has argued: crime victims have a right to be heard in court.”
“If there is compelling evidence to support vacating the conviction of Adnan Syed, we will be the first to agree,” Sanford said. “To date, the public has not seen evidence which would warrant overturning a murder conviction that has withstood appeals for over two decades.”
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.
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 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.
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