As he challenges his murder conviction, Adnan Syed, the star of the ground-breaking crime podcast “Serial,” is asking for a sentence reduction, according to a statement released by his legal team on Monday.
For killing his high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999 when he was just 17 years old, Syed received a life sentence plus 30 years in prison. After a Baltimore municipal judge reversed the verdict, he was released in 2022 after serving almost 24 years in jail.
Syed’s conviction was upheld last year, but he was basically permitted to stay free when Lee’s family challenged the ruling, claiming they weren’t given enough notice to present their case in court. His defense team is still working to have his conviction overturned.
Under Maryland’s Juvenile Restoration Act, which permits anyone incarcerated for at least 20 years for offenses committed when they were kids to request reductions, Syed’s legal team filed the reduction request Friday in Baltimore Circuit Court and made the announcement Monday.
Syed is 43 years old now.
According to Erica J. Suter, director of the University of Baltimore Law School’s Innocence Project Clinic, which has supported Adnan’s cause, this filing is a minor step in the right direction toward securing his freedom and stabilizing his custody status.
Lee’s family attorney David Sanford stated via email on Monday that Syed’s attorneys “have not presented a shred of new, let alone compelling, evidence” that he is innocent or deserving of a lighter sentence.
Sanford declared, “Adnan Syed is still a convicted murderer.” “Syed’s lawyers are now pleading for compassion, claiming that Mr. Syed poses no threat to the public, after failing to present fresh evidence and without Mr. Syed admitting his guilt. In the coming days, we will meet with Hae Min Lee’s family and deliver our case to the court.”
Last year, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision to reinstate Syed’s conviction, stating that Lee’s brother, Young Lee, was not given the “dignity, respect, and sensitivity” he deserved when a court failed to promptly notify him of the proceedings.
Although the high court did not order Syed to be imprisoned, his legal team is still worried about the possibility.
The Maryland Office of the Public Defender said in a statement announcing the sentence reduction request on Monday that “he and his loved ones live with the constant fear that he will be sent back to prison because the conviction was reinstated.”
In an effort to reverse Syed’s conviction, the office is collaborating with the Innocence Project Clinic.
According to Syed’s legal team’s request to the Baltimore Circuit Court, he has “conducted himself admirably” while he is free, helping to care for his elderly parents and in-laws while working for Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, which aims to empower inmates and ex-offenders as professionals, scholars, 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 disappeared 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 affiliateWBAL 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 were not property scrutinized, they have said. The same institution that secured a murder conviction, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, successfully filed to vacate Syed’s conviction.
DNA from Lee’s shoes her body was found with evidence of strangulation was re-examined with more contemporary technology andexcludedSyed 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 rest of his sentence.
“We maintain his innocence and our mission of proving that hasn t changed,” Suter, of the Innocence Project Clinic, said in Monday’s statement about the reduction request. “If granted, we can turn our focus back to vacating his unjust conviction, again.
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