Maryland’s Supreme Court reinstated Adnan Syed’s convictions in a ruling Friday but said he will remain free while his case returns to Baltimore Circuit Court.
The order essentially restarts the process after the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office filed a motion to vacate Syed’s conviction for the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee, who was strangled to death and buried in a clandestine grave in Baltimore’s Leakin Park. The court said the initial hearing violated her brother Young Lee’s right as a crime victim’s representative to participate.
The court’s 4-3 ruling does not require Syed, who was freed nearly two years ago, to be incarcerated again while the case resumes.
“On remand, the parties and Mr. Lee will begin where they were immediately after the State’s Attorney filed the motion to vacate,” the court wrote in an opinion published online Friday morning.
The Supreme Court justices said Lee should have been given more notice of the hearing that freed Syed, been able to attend in person and been given the chance to speak about the legal issues and fairness of the state’s motion to throw out his conviction. However, they disagreed that Lee or his attorney had the right to call witnesses or present evidence, as he had argued.
The court’s ruling significantly broadens the ability of crime victims and their families to participate in hearings for criminal cases, according to legal observers.
“This is a massive expansion of the role that victims play in the legal system,” said David Jaros, a law professor at University of Baltimore.
Syed’s attorney Erica J. Suter said in a statement Friday that his legal team disagreed with the court’s ruling but will keep working to exonerate him.
“Adnan is innocent,” Suter said. “This appeal was about the process for the vacatur, it did not challenge the substance of the vacatur — that there was a Brady violation, that the other evidence supporting his conviction has been debunked, and that subsequent DNA testing excluded Adnan.”
Evidence that supports a defendant’s innocence is known as Brady material, and prosecutors are required to disclose any such information to the defense.
Suter acknowledged the Lee family’s suffering but said reinstating Syed’s “wrongful conviction” would not give them closure.
David Sanford, Lee’s attorney, said in a separate statement that the court’s decision affirmed crime victims’ rights “to be treated with dignity, respect and sensitivity.”
“The Supreme Court acknowledges what Hae Min Lee’s family has argued: crime victims have a right to be heard in court,” Sanford said.
He said the Lee family will now get the chance to address “the merits” of prosecutors’ motion to vacate Syed’s convictions, adding that the public has not yet seen compelling evidence that supports throwing out the case.
“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 new hearing would take place under the administration of a different state’s attorney, Ivan Bates, and be handled by a new prosecutor after Becky Feldman’s departure from the office. Bates, who took office in January, said while campaigning that he believed Syed’s conviction was flawed and he should be freed.
“We need some time to figure out what’s going on with this 185-page opinion,” Bates told reporters Friday.
The decision comes nearly 11 months after state Supreme Court justices questioned lawyers for Syed and Lee at oral argument Oct. 6.
A timeline of Adnan Syed’s journey through Baltimore’s criminal justice system
Syed’s legal saga rose to international renown with the hit podcast, “Serial,” which debuted in 2014. The show examined Hae Min Lee’s killing as well as the subsequent prosecution of Syed, her former high school sweetheart.
A jury in 2000 found Syed guilty of murder and related charges in Lee’s death, with a judge later sentencing Syed to life plus 30 years in prison. The convictions withstood numerous appeals from Syed, who maintained his innocence as years turned to decades behind bars.
His break came in 2021, when Baltimore prosecutors began reviewing his case in consideration of a new law allowing people convicted of crimes before they turned 18 to petition a court to reconsider their penalty. The review spawned a full-throttled reinvestigation of the case, which, prosecutors said, revealed alternative suspects in Lee’s killing not before disclosed to Syed.
The revelation led prosecutors to lose faith in the “integrity” of his decades-old conviction. They moved to vacate the guilty findings.
On a Friday afternoon in September 2022, the presiding judge scheduled the vacatur proceeding for the following Monday. Prosecutors then informed Hae Min Lee’s brother, Young Lee, saying he could watch the hearing by Zoom, but a lawyer for Young Lee insisted his client, who lived in California, wanted to attend in-person and wasn’t given enough time to travel.
The hearing happened anyway and Syed walked free after 23 years behind bars.
Questions, however, continued about that hearing and Young Lee’s role in it. Though he was allowed to speak at the hearing by Zoom, Young Lee filed an appeal before prosecutors dismissed Syed’s charges in October of that year, arguing the short notice violated his rights as a crime victim. The intermediate Appellate Court of Maryland sided with Lee, ordering in March 2023 that Syed’s convictions be reinstated for a do-over of the hearing to vacate them.
Syed promptly appealed to the state Supreme Court, which held off on reinstating his charges while it considered whether to take up his case, and Young Lee followed suit, arguing the appeals court’s ruling didn’t go far enough for crime victims. Last June, the Supreme Court accepted and combined the dueling appeals from Syed and Lee.
Three justices dissented from the majority’s opinion on Friday.
Calling the case a “procedural zombie,” now-retired Justice Michele D. Hotten wrote that Lee had no right to appeal because prosecutors had dismissed Syed’s charges. Hotten also disagreed with the majority’s interpretation of crime victims’ rights.
Justice Brynja McDivitt Booth wrote in another dissenting opinion that the majority’s ruling could have implications for the separation of powers, by creating a right for victims to be heard that doesn’t exist in state law.
“The Majority also re-writes the victims’ rights statutes to provide a right where the Legislature has declined to provide one. Respectfully, it is not our role to act as a super legislature when we think our policies are better,” she wrote.
Jaros, faculty director of the University of Baltimore School of Law’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform, agreed that the majority’s expansion of crime victims’ role went beyond what legislators intended.
Calling the decision “rather shocking,” Jaros said the court is introducing a “third voice” into the criminal process by allowing victims and their attorneys to give their perspectives on legal issues such as whether a constitutional right was violated, rather than simply talking about the crime’s impact on them.
“Not only do I think that’s a radical change, I don’t think that’s a change that was envisioned by the General Assembly,” Jaros said.
It’s unclear whether a re-do of the 2022 hearing with new prosecutors will produce a different outcome for Syed. But broadening victims’ role in these proceedings, as the ruling does, creates another hurdle in attempts to revisit potentially flawed convictions, Jaros said.
