A Maryland judge ruled on Thursday that Adnan Syed will not return to prison after prosecutors in Baltimore decided last week to withdraw a motion to vacate his murder conviction despite efforts to clear his record.
The case has gone back and forth since it became the subject of widespread attention in 2014, when the podcast “Serial” raised questions about the investigation into the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee, 18.
Judge Jennifer Schiffer of Baltimore City Circuit Court said in her decision that Mr. Syed “is not a danger to the public” and that “the interests of justice will be better served by a reduced sentence” of time served. Mr. Syed will enter a period of five years of “supervised probation,” according to the court filing.
Mr. Syed was 17 when he was found guilty in 2000 of killing Ms. Lee, his former high school girlfriend, and sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2022 after a Baltimore City Circuit Court judge vacated the conviction, but it was reinstated in 2023. In 2024, the Maryland Supreme Court ordered the trial court to redo the hearing that freed Mr. Syed.
After the state’s attorney said on Feb. 25 that the conviction would remain in place, Mr. Syed spoke at a hearing on Feb. 26 at the Circuit Court for Baltimore City.
“Your honor, I humbly ask that you continue to allow me to be with my family and friends as I have been the past two and a half years,” he said. “I humbly request to remain free so I can continue to contribute to society and build a meaningful life outside of incarceration.”
“I hope that everyone understands that Hae Min Lee and her family are the true victims in this case,” Judge Schiffer said at the end of the hearing. She added, “There are very real consequences to everyone in this case.”
At the hearing, Mr. Syed’s friends, brother and employer, as well as two mental health workers, testified about his character.
Mr. Syed’s younger brother, Yusef Syed, said that Mr. Syed was “the only person who had high expectations of me.”
“If there is anything good you see in me as a human being, it’s because of his influence,” he said.
Erica Suter, Mr. Syed’s lawyer, argued that her client did not pose a danger to society and that he was devoted to improving himself. He took advantage of education programs in prison, has been married for five years and had earned a promotion in his job. She also asked the judge to consider his age at the time of the crime and a statement from the original judge who sentenced him calling for his punishment to be reduced.
“He is a walking demonstration of someone who is rehabilitated,” Ms. Suter said. “He hasn’t gotten so much as a parking ticket in three years. I wish I could say the same.”
David Sanford, a lawyer for Ms. Lee’s family, said Mr. Syed’s sentence should not be reduced, in part because he was found guilty in 2000 and because the “momentum” to release him was generated by media coverage.
In 2014, “Serial” cast doubts on parts of the case, including the credibility of cellphone tower records used in the investigation. It also raised questions about the existence of an alibi witness who had not been asked to testify.
The podcast generated global interest in the case, was downloaded more than 100 million times in its first year and won a Peabody award. (In 2020, The New York Times Company bought Serial Productions, the company behind the podcast.)
Mr. Syed’s case has ping-ponged through the court system for more than a decade. His conviction was vacated in 2018, but he remained incarcerated and the decision was reversed in 2019.
Young Lee, Ms. Lee’s brother, said at the hearing on Feb. 26 that, because of the media coverage of Ms. Lee’s murder decades later, he felt as if he were “living it over and over again.”
In emotional testimony, Mr. Lee said that he and his sister had a tough childhood, but that it seemed as if things were improving just before he received a call saying that the police had found his sister’s body.
Lawyers for the Lee family also played an emotional video statement from Ms. Lee’s mother, Youn Wha Kim, who spoke in Korean and described the pain of her daughter’s death, which led her to contemplate suicide.
“I lived my life trying to remember her voice, to not forget it,” she said, according to an English translation that was read in court.
Mr. Syed was emotional as he acknowledged the pain Ms. Lee’s family had suffered.
“When I came home, there was a huge media spotlight,” he said. “I remember Young saying — when they released me — how painful that was. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to keep my head down and focus on my job.’ I never did any interview in large part because it caused them pain.”
Before the hearing on Feb. 26, the office of Ivan J. Bates, the Baltimore City state’s attorney, said it would drop the attempt to cancel Mr. Syed’s conviction because the motion to vacate the conviction that had been filed by Mr. Bates’s predecessor, Marilyn Mosby, contained “falsehoods and misleading statements.”
It was a surprising move because Mr. Bates had promised during an unsuccessful campaign for state’s attorney in 2018 to drop the prosecution of Mr. Syed. He was sworn in as state’s attorney in January 2023.
“I can’t put forth information that I know could potentially be misleading or false,” Mr. Bates said in an interview before the hearing on Feb. 25. “So I understand people’s anger and angst toward me — I get it — but I have an ethical duty to present that information as actual facts.”
His office filed a memo on Tuesday outlining its findings and released a document summarizing its arguments.
Though Mr. Bates will not vacate Mr. Syed’s conviction based on his predecessor’s efforts, he said at the hearing that Mr. Syed should not return to prison.
“While I cannot ethically put forth the motion to vacate, I can stand and say I support Mr. Syed receiving a modification in his sentence to time served,” he said. “That is something that myself and my office support.”
In a statement on Feb. 26, before the judge ruled in the matter, Ms. Suter said she was “hopeful that the court will see what we see,” that Mr. Syed “is a walking demonstration of a positive and contributing member of society; that he has spent his entire incarceration and the past two years demonstrating that he is worthy of a sentence reduction.”
In December, Mr. Syed’s lawyers filed a motion to reduce his sentence under Maryland’s Juvenile Restoration Act, which allows defendants convicted as minors to request a reduced sentence after serving 20 years in prison.
The post Adnan Syed Will Not Return to Prison, Judge Rules appeared first on New York Times.
