Maryland’s Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling to overturn a vacancy of Adnan Syed’s murder conviction, dealing a blow to a movement to free the man who supporters say was exonerated by evidence and procedural failures in his first case.
Syed was initially convicted for Hae Min Lee’s murder in 2000, a trial which the podcast “Serial” covered, detailing the case and poking holes in the evidence brought against Syed, then the ex-boyfriend of Lee.
Syed, whose conviction was vacated in 2022 after evidence implicating two other suspects was found to have been improperly withheld, had that vacancy overturned in March of last year by the state’s appellate court.
The decision, due to the court’s failure to give Lee’s brother ample time to reach the court hearings on the conviction, is another disappointment to advocates for Syed.
“Mr. Lee had the right to attend the hearing on the motion to vacate in person . . . he did not receive sufficient notice of the hearing to reasonably permit him to do so,” the court’s opinion read.
That appellate ruling made a splash last year when it sent the recently freed Syed back behind bars over what critics of the court called a minor procedural issue.
“What they did was not only reinstate the conviction and say the hearing's got to be done over, they didn't touch the merits to the hearing,” Rabia Chaudry, an attorney who has appeared on the “Serial” podcast, told Salon’s D. Watkins last year about the appellate ruling. “They didn't say that the judge made a wrong decision by granting the conviction to be vacated or there was anything wrong with the state's attorneys.”
That ruling was a setback for Syed and innocence advocates, as is the Supreme Court’s ruling.
"No other exoneree in this country has gotten this kind of treatment," Chaudry said last year.
The ruling, which three of the seven judges on the top court dissented on, likely paves the way for Syed to fight once again to have his conviction vacated.
