Adnan Syed, who was the subject of the groundbreaking crime podcast “Serial,” is requesting a sentence reduction so he can remain free as he fights his murder conviction, his legal team said Monday.
Syed was sentenced to life plus 30 years for the 1999 murder of high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee when he was 17. He had served nearly 24 years in prison when he was released in 2022 after a Baltimore judge overturned the conviction.
But Lee’s family fought the decision, arguing they weren’t offered sufficient notice to argue before the court, and Syed’s conviction was reinstated in 2023 but he was essentially allowed to remain free. His legal team continues to fight to overturn his conviction.
The reduction request, filed in Baltimore Circuit Court on Friday but announced Monday, was made under Maryland’s Juvenile Restoration Act, which allows those imprisoned for at least 20 years for crimes that took place when they were minors to ask for reductions, Syed’s legal team said.
Syed is now 43.
“This filing is a small step toward ensuring that Adnan’s custody status is stabilized and his freedom is safeguarded,” said Erica J. Suter, director of the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore Law School, which has championed his case.
David Sanford, a lawyer for Lee’s family, said by email Monday that Syed’s legal representatives “have not presented a shred of new, let alone compelling, evidence” supporting his innocence or worthiness for a reduced sentence.
“Adnan Syed remains a convicted murderer,” Sanford said. “Having failed to produce new evidence and without any acknowledgment of guilt by Mr. Syed, Syed’s attorneys now seek mercy, arguing that Mr. Syed is not a danger to the public. We will confer with the family of Hae Min Lee and present our position to the court in the days ahead.”
The Maryland Supreme Court in 2023 affirmed a lower court’s decision to reinstate Syed’s conviction because, according to its ruling, Lee’s brother, Young Lee, was not treated with “dignity, respect, and sensitivity” when a court failed to inform him of the process in a timely manner.
The high court did not order Syed incarcerated, but his legal team remains concerned about whether that could happen.
“Because the conviction was reinstated, he and his loved ones live with the constant fear that he will be sent back to prison,” the Maryland Office of the Public Defender said in its statement Monday announcing the sentence reduction request.
The office is working with the University of Baltimore School of Law Innocence Project Clinic to overturn Syed’s conviction.
In its request to the Baltimore Circuit Court, Syed’s legal team said he’s “conducted himself admirably” while free, helping to take care of aging parents and in-laws while working for Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, which seeks to empower prisoners and former prisoners as scholars, professionals and advocates.
In 2014, “Serial” broke ground as the most prominent in a new wave of true crime podcasts, with its journalists focusing on the shortcomings of a winner-takes-all justice system whose losers are disproportionately nonwhite. HBO followed up with a docuseries, “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” in 2019.
Syed and Lee attended Woodlawn High School and had been dating secretly — they feared their parents were too far apart culturally to understand — when they broke up in December 1998, “Serial” reported. Lee was seeing someone else when she went missing the next month, and her body was found in February 1999.
Prosecutors presented cellphone data on Syed’s whereabouts and the testimony of a witness who said he helped Syed bury Lee’s body, according to NBC affiliate WBAL of Baltimore. But a friend who said Syed was with her at the time did not testify.
Prosecutors re-examined the case against Syed and ultimately sided with his defenders after they found unreliable evidence and at least two alternative suspects who weren’t property scrutinized, they have said. The same institution that secured a murder conviction, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, successfully filed to have Syed’s conviction vacated.
DNA from Lee’s shoes — her body was found with evidence of strangulation — was re-examined with more contemporary technology and excludes Syed as a suspect, prosecutors have said.
Syed remains a murder convict as his legal team seeks to have his conviction vacated anew. As such, he can be remanded to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.
“We maintain his innocence and our mission of proving that hasn’t changed,” Suter said in Monday’s statement on the reduction request. “If granted, we can turn our focus back to vacating his unjust conviction, again.”
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