Baltimore prosecutors filed a motion supporting Adnan Syed’s recent request to have his sentence reduced to time served, which could ensure he remains free indefinitely as he awaits further court decisions in a decadeslong legal saga that amassed a large following from the hit podcast “Serial.”
Syed was released from prison in 2022 after prosecutors asked a judge to overturn his murder conviction in the 1999 slaying of his high school ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. But challenges from Lee’s family later led to his conviction being reinstated. In August, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision ordering a new hearing about vacating the conviction.
Last month, Syed’s attorneys filed a motion asking for his sentence to be reduced under Maryland’s relatively new Juvenile Restoration Act, which allows people serving long sentences for crimes they committed as minors to seek release after 20 years behind bars. The legislation was passed amid growing consensus that such defendants are especially open to rehabilitation, in part because brain science shows cognitive development continues well beyond the teenage years. Syed was 17 when Lee was found strangled to death and buried in a makeshift grave.
Prosecutors filed the motion in support of a sentence reduction on Sunday, according to the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office.
In it, State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said Syed’s request is “in the interest of justice.”
“I truly believe Mr. Syed’s case is precisely what legislators envisioned when they crafted the Juvenile Restoration Act,” Bates said in a statement Monday. “We have an individual who has served over 20 years in prison from the time he was a teenager and who has displayed tremendous personal growth and reform.”
But attorneys for the Lee family argue it’s premature to consider a sentence reduction while the integrity of the conviction is still up in the air.
“That question regarding ultimate guilt or innocence needs to be resolved before any thought of reducing Mr. Syed’s sentence can be considered,” attorney David Sanford said in a statement. “Currently Mr. Syed remains a convicted murderer and nothing the State or Mr. Syed has ever presented calls that fact into question.”
The case, which has been rife with legal twists and turns, has more recently pitted criminal justice reform efforts against the rights of crime victims and their families, whose voices are often at odds with a growing movement to acknowledge and correct longstanding issues such as systemic racism, police misconduct and prosecutorial missteps.
Since his release in 2022, Syed has been working at Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative and helping care for his aging parents, according to court filings. His father died in October after a long illness.
“He cares so much about our family,” his mother wrote in a recent letter to the court. “He is married and tries to be the best husband he can. He is always trying to help us out anyway that he can. He has tried hard to become a positive member of his community.”
Syed has maintained his innocence from the beginning, but many questions about the case remain unanswered even after the “Serial” podcast combed through the evidence, reexamined legal arguments and interviewed witnesses. The series debuted in 2014 and drew millions of listeners who became armchair detectives.
Prosecutors wrote that since his release from prison in 2022, Syed, 43, has shown he doesn’t pose a threat to public safety.
“In taking this position, the State does not want to minimize the seriousness of the crime in this case,” the motion says. “The State, however, does not believe in warehousing individuals who committed a crime when they were a juvenile and have demonstrated maturity, have been rehabilitated [and] are now fit to reenter society.”
But the motion doesn’t present a position on Syed’s conviction itself.
The Maryland Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling in August called for a new hearing on whether the conviction should be vacated because the victim’s relatives didn’t receive adequate notice to allow them to attend the original proceeding, which won Syed his freedom.
Bates, who took office as state’s attorney a few months after the 2022 hearing, is now weighing how to proceed given the Supreme Court’s decision. But if Syed’s motion for a reduced sentence is granted, he would likely avoid going back to prison regardless.
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