The Maryland Supreme Court has reinstated Adnan Syed’s murder conviction and ordered a new hearing after ruling that the legal rights of the victim’s family were violated during a court proceeding that led to Syed’s release. The 4–3 split decision handed down on Aug. 30 means that Syed, who was convicted in 2000 of murdering his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, remains legally convicted even though he has been free since September 2022.
While the high court’s ruling reinstates Syed’s conviction, the justices did not order any changes to his release, ordering the case remanded to a lower court for rehearing to give Young Lee, the brother of Hae Min Lee, an opportunity to attend the hearing in person. The Maryland Supreme Court found that the prosecutor and the lower court did not afford Young Lee the rights guaranteed to crime victims’ representatives under Maryland law.
Young Lee, who lives in California, was given less than one business day’s notice of the hearing that vacated Syed’s conviction, preventing him from attending in person. Instead, Lee participated in the hearing remotely, and the lower court denied his request for a brief postponement to allow him to attend in person. The Supreme Court ruled that this constituted an injustice against Lee by failing to treat him with dignity while depriving him of his rights.
“The prosecutor and the circuit court worked an injustice against Mr. Lee by failing to treat him with dignity, respect, and sensitivity and, in particular, by violating Mr. Lee’s rights as a crime victim’s representative to reasonable notice of the Vacatur Hearing, the right to attend the hearing in person, and the right to be heard on the merits of the Vacatur Motion,” the majority opinion reads.
The high court ruled that Lee’s appeal was valid because it could still provide a remedy for the violation of his rights as a crime victim’s representative without infringing on Syed’s protection against double jeopardy. “That remedy is to reinstate Mr. Syed’s convictions and to remand the case to the circuit court for further proceedings relating to the Vacatur Motion, consistent with this opinion,” the court ruled.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Michele Hotten criticized the decision, referring to the case as a “procedural zombie” that has been needlessly revived despite being moot. “It has been reanimated, despite its expiration,” Hotten wrote in her dissent, which two other justices joined. “The doctrine of mootness was designed to prevent such judicial necromancy.”
Syed’s case, which was the subject of the popular “Serial” podcast, has drawn intense public scrutiny and raised questions about the fairness of his trial and the reliability of the evidence used to convict him. Syed, now 43, has consistently maintained his innocence. In recent years, his case has been reexamined under Maryland laws addressing so-called “juvenile lifers,” leading to the discovery of alternative suspects and the unreliability of key evidence presented at his original trial. Syed was 17 when Lee’s body was found in 1999. He was subsequently convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In 2022, Baltimore prosecutors moved to vacate Syed’s conviction. They said that DNA recovered from Lee’s shoes excluded Syed as a suspect after testing was conducted using more modern techniques than when he was initially convicted. However, an appellate court reinstated Syed’s conviction in 2023, with the case landing before the Maryland Supreme Court.
The Maryland Supreme Court’s decision, which reaffirmed Syed’s conviction and ordered a new hearing to reassess the case, marks the latest chapter in the lengthy legal saga, which now returns to a lower court for further proceedings.
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