Adnan Syed faces retrial for murder after his acquittal is quashed

Adnan Syed, the subject of the hit podcast Serial, has had his murder conviction reinstated and faces a retrial after originally being acquitted over the killing of his high school ex-girlfriend.
The Maryland supreme court ruled on Friday that a hearing that freed Syed from prison violated the legal rights of Hae Min Lee’s family and must be reheard.
Millions of listeners followed an investigation into the case, with it countless legal twists and turns, in the true crime podcast. The series transformed podcasting when it was released in 2014, shattering streaming and downloading records.
Syed, 43, has maintained his innocence, while the victim’s family continue to hold him responsible. Lee, 18, was found strangled and buried in an unmarked grave in a park in Baltimore in 1999. Syed was sentenced to life in prison, plus 30 years, in 2000.
He was freed in 2022, after a circuit court judge found deficiencies in how prosecutors had turned over evidence to the defence decades ago.
However, the state supreme court ruled that prosecutors and the lower court judge had caused an injustice in that hearing, violating the rights of the family. The court said the family did not receive adequate notice to attend the hearing in person.
Erica Suter, Syed’s lawyer, argued that the state did meet its obligation by allowing Lee’s brother, Young Lee, to participate via video.
“In an effort to remedy what they perceived to be an injustice to Mr Syed, the prosecutor and the circuit court worked an injustice against Mr Lee by failing to treat him with dignity, respect, and sensitivity,” the judges said in the ruling.
The judges said that Syed’s convictions should be reinstated and the case sent back to a lower court for a new hearing on whether the case should be thrown out.
It was the latest decision in Syed’s protracted legal odyssey. A lower court had ordered a retrial in 2016 on the grounds that Syed’s lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, did not contact an alibi witness and provided ineffective counsel — but an appeal court overturned that ruling three years later. Gutierrez died in 2004.
Prosecutors relied heavily on testimony by Jay Wilds, a friend of Syed’s who said that he had helped Syed, who was then 17, bury her body. They presented mobile phone records that they said placed Syed near the park where Lee’s body was found.
Serial questioned the credibility of the phone records, and revealed that physical evidence gathered in 1999 was never tested for Syed’s DNA. The podcast’s producers also poked holes in Wilds’ account, pointing to various inconsistencies.