A Maryland appeals court has reinstated the murder conviction of Serial podcast subject Adnan Syed, six months after it was overturned.
Syed was handed a life sentence in 2000 for the murder of his former high school girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, whose body was discovered partially buried in a Baltimore Park the year prior.
In September last year, a circuit court judge vacated Syed’s murder conviction. She said the state had failed to hand over evidence which could have affected the outcome of his original trial in 2000.
Prosecutors were given 30 days to decide whether to retry Syed, and they chose to drop the case.
At the time of his release, Syed had served more than 20 years in prison.
Per The Guardian, Young Lee, the brother of Hae Min, filed an appeal in December arguing a circuit court judge had violated his rights because they did not give him adequate time to attend a critical hearing in the case.
On Tuesday, a Maryland appellate court panel ruled that giving Lee one business day’s notice was “insufficient time to reasonably allow Mr Lee, who lived in California, to attend” the hearing in person, per Al Jazeera.
In a 2-1 decision, the panel ordered a do-over of the hearing which saw Syed’s conviction be overturned.
“This court has the power and obligation to remedy those violations, as long as we can do so without violating Mr Syed’s right to be free from double jeopardy,” the panel said, per the ABC.
“Accordingly, we vacate the circuit court’s order vacating Mr Syed’s convictions, which results in the reinstatement of the original convictions and sentence.”
According to The Washington Post, the panel has allowed a 60-day delay for the “mandate” of its decision to allow the prosecution and defence “time to assess how to proceed in response”.
Since he was handed a life sentence for strangling Hae Min Lee, Syed has maintained his innocence.
The first season of Serial, a true crime podcast released in 2014, reignited national interest in the case. Two years later, a judge granted Adnan Syed a new trial, but Maryland’s highest court reversed this decision in 2019.
