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The most recent development in the protracted legal saga detailed in the popular audio “Serial” was the reinstatement of Adnan Syed’s murder conviction and order for a new hearing from a Maryland appellate court on Tuesday.
Adnan Syed will not be detained again right away despite the fact that his sentence has been overturned.
The Appellate Court of Maryland found in a 2-1 decision issued on Tuesday that the lower court’s September hearing that overturned Syed’s conviction and allowed him to go free after more than 20 years in prison did not give the victim’s family adequate notice when it was scheduled.
The court’s ruling is not effective for 60 days.
According to Maryland law, victims have the right to advance notice of such hearings, and the appellate court found that this right was broken in the case of Hae Min Lee’s sibling. Syed was found guilty of the murder of Lee, his high school ex-girlfriend, whose corpse was discovered in a makeshift grave after she vanished in 1999.
After reviewing the case and discovering alternate suspects and questionable trial evidence, Baltimore prosecutors sought to overturn Adnan Syed’s conviction in September. The hearing on the state’s motion to vacate was then promptly set by the lower court.
On a Friday afternoon, Lee’s sibling Young Lee received word that the hearing would take place the following Monday. The appellate court determined that requiring him to attend remotely and giving him just one business day’s notice of the hearing was “insufficient time to reasonably allow Mr. Lee, who lived in California, to attend the hearing in person.”
Young Lee requested that the hearing be postponed for a week so that he could attend in person, but the judge rejected his request, so Young Lee attended the hearing via Zoom.
The Lee family believed justice had been done for decades, but when prosecutors determined their case was in fact flawed from the start, they were treated as an afterthought, their lawyers have claimed. The appellate panel essentially concurred.
The court ruled that it is consistent with the constitutional mandate that victims be treated with dignity and respect to permit a victim who is entitled to attend a court proceeding to do so in person, provided that the victim requests it and that everyone else engaged in the hearing also shows up in person.
Baltimore prosecutors had 30 days to determine whether to retry Adnan Syed after his conviction was overturned. While the Lee family’s appeal was pending, they made their decision to withdraw the charges eight days before the deadline was up.
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The state acted “with the purpose… of preventing Mr. Lee from obtaining a ruling on the appeal,” the appellate judges concluded after questioning that timeline, which Adnan Syed’s attorneys subsequently claimed was moot because there were no underlying charges.
The three-judge panel’s main line of inquiry during the oral arguments last month was whether the case should be deemed moot.
Judge Stuart Berger remarked during the hearing that “if the case is moot, it makes all the difference in the world.”
The Lee family claimed in their appeal that the “right to be heard” at conviction vacatur proceedings applies to crime victims or their representatives. The judges ruled that victims do not have a right to meaningful involvement in such hearings and said they were not persuaded by that defense. A decision to the opposite, they claimed, would “result in a huge shift in practice.”
According to the judges, they must correct the errors made by the lower court “so long as we can do so without violating Mr. Adnan Syed’s right to be free from double jeopardy,” which means he will be tried twice for the same offense.
Read: Adnan Syed’s murder conviction reinstated
The judgment stated, “We can do that, and as a result, we vacate the circuit court’s order vacating Mr. Adnan Syed’s convictions, which has the effect of reinstating the initial convictions and punishment.
