Adnan Syed News: Murder conviction in Hae Min Lee and Serial podcast case remains restored; court orders new hearing

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – A 2022 trial that released Adnan Syed from prison violated the legal rights of the victim's family and must be retried, the Maryland Supreme Court ruled Friday, marking the latest development in the ongoing legal saga that attracted worldwide attention years ago through the hit podcast “Serial.”

The 4-3 ruling means Syed's murder conviction will remain reinstated for the foreseeable future. It comes about 11 months after the court heard arguments last October in a case that has been filled with legal twists and divided court rulings since Syed's 2000 conviction for the killing of his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee.

Syed has been free since October 2022. Although the Supreme Court ruling reinstated his convictions, the judges did not order any changes to his release.

The court concluded that prosecutors and a lower court, in an effort to right what they perceived as an injustice to Syed, committed “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 timely notice of the hearing that led to Syed's release.

The court ruled that the remedy was to “reinstate Mr. Syed's convictions and remand the case to the district court for further proceedings.”

The court also stated that Lee would be given timely notice of the new hearing “to give Mr. Lee a reasonable opportunity to attend the hearing in person” and to give him or his attorney the opportunity to be heard.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Michele Hotten wrote that “this case exists as a procedural zombie.”

“It was revived despite its expiration,” Hotten wrote. “The doctrine of mootness was created to prevent such legal necromancy.”

At the latest point of contention in the case, recent efforts to reform criminal justice conflict with the legal rights of crime victims and their families, whose voices often conflict with a growing movement to acknowledge and correct systemic problems such as past racism, police misconduct and prosecutorial missteps.

The seven-judge panel weighed the extent to which crime victims have the right to participate in hearings that could overturn a conviction. To that end, the court considered whether to uphold an appeals court ruling in favor of the Lee family in 2023. It reinstated Syed's murder conviction a year after a judge granted a request by Baltimore prosecutors to overturn it because of insufficient evidence.

Syed, 43, maintains his innocence and has often expressed concern for Lee's surviving relatives. The young girl was found strangled 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 deficiencies in the evidence.

However, in March 2023, the Appellate Court of Maryland, the state's appellate court, ordered a rehearing, which earned Syed his release and reinstated his conviction. The court said the victim's family was not notified in time to attend the hearing in person, violating their right under state law to be “treated with dignity and respect.”

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Syed's attorney, Erica Suter, argued that the state had fulfilled its obligation by allowing Young Lee to attend the hearing via video conference.

Syed appealed the reinstatement of his conviction, and the Lee family also appealed to the state Supreme Court, arguing that crime victims should be given a greater role in the process of overturning a conviction.

Syed remains free while final appeals work their way through state courts.

During oral arguments last year, his lawyers argued that the Lee family's appeal was moot because prosecutors decided not to retry him after his conviction was overturned. And even if their brother's rights had been violated, lawyers argued, he had not shown whether the alleged violation would have changed the outcome of the hearing.

This was not the first time that Maryland's highest court had dealt with Syed's lengthy legal odyssey.

In 2019, a divided court voted 4-3 to deny Syed a new trial. A lower court had ordered a retrial in 2016 on the grounds that Syed's lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, had failed to contact an alibi witness and provided inadequate legal advice. Gutierrez died in 2004.

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

Recently, prosecutors in Baltimore re-examined Syed's record under a Maryland law that punishes so-called “juveniles with life imprisonment” 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.

Rather than reconsider the verdict, prosecutors filed a motion to overturn Syed's conviction entirely. They later decided not to re-file charges against him after receiving the results of a DNA test conducted using more modern testing techniques than originally used. DNA recovered from Lee's shoes eliminated Syed as a suspect, prosecutors said.

Syed's case was documented on the podcast “Serial,” which first aired in 2014 and attracted millions of listeners who became amateur detectives as the series dissected the case. The show changed the true crime genre by upending podcast streaming and download records, uncovering little-known evidence and raising new questions about the case.

The video in the player above is from an earlier report.