Prosecutors in Baltimore will withdraw a motion to vacate the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, whose case has been ping-ponging in the court system since being chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” the Baltimore City state’s attorney said on Tuesday.
Mr. Syed spent decades in prison fighting a conviction for the death of his high school girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. The podcast, released in 2014, presented new evidence and led to a swell of interest in the case.
In 2022, Mr. Syed was released from prison when a Baltimore City Circuit Court judge vacated the conviction. The charges against Mr. Syed were dropped later that year, but his conviction was later reinstated, and Maryland’s highest court ordered a redo of the hearing that freed him.
An attorney representing Mr. Syed criticized the motion and said Mr. Syed had not committed the crimes he had been convicted of. The decision “ignores the injustices on which this conviction was founded,” Erica J. Suter, the attorney, said in a statement.
The Baltimore City state’s attorney, Ivan J. Bates, said that his office had determined that the motion to vacate the conviction by his predecessor, Marilyn Mosby, contained “falsehoods and misleading statements.”
“I did not make this decision lightly, but it is necessary to preserve the credibility of our office and maintain public trust in the justice system,” Mr. Bates said in a statement.
In the past, Mr. Bates has made statements sympathetic to Mr. Syed. In 2018, while Mr. Bates was running to be the State’s Attorney, he told Rolling Stone that if he was elected, he would drop the case against Syed. In his concession speech after losing the Democratic primary in 2018, he called on prosecutors to “stop the prosecution of Adnan Syed now.”
Mr. Syed was found guilty of murder, robbery, kidnapping and false imprisonment, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2000. He was 17 at the time of Ms. Lee’s death.
A hearing will be held on Wednesday on a motion to reduce Mr. Syed’s sentence that his lawyers filed in December under the Juvenile Restoration Act. The law allows defendants convicted as minors to request a reduced sentence after serving 20 years in prison.
A decade ago, the release of “Serial” raised doubts about the facts around the case. The podcast was downloaded more than 100 million times in its first year and brought national public attention to Mr. Syed’s case. (In 2020, The New York Times Company bought Serial Productions, the company behind the podcast.)
“Mr. Syed remains a convicted murderer,” David Sanford, a lawyer for Ms. Lee’s family, said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that nothing, including the media attention surrounding the case, would change that.
Over the past decade, the case has gone back and forth in Maryland courts.
In February 2015, a Maryland court agreed to hear an appeal from Mr. Syed, and he was granted a new hearing in November of that year, allowing new evidence to be introduced. He was granted a new trial in 2016.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld the decision to grant him a new trial and vacated his conviction in 2018. In 2019, the Court of Appeals, reversed that decision, denying him a new trial and reinstating his conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court later declined to hear his case.
In 2022, prosecutors agreed to new DNA testing. They later asked a judge to overturn Mr. Syed’s conviction. A judge vacated his conviction again days later, and the charges were dropped in October of that year.
Months later, in 2023, the special appeals court, which by then had been renamed the Appellate Court of Maryland, reinstated Mr. Syed’s murder conviction. It ruled that the lower court had violated the rights of Ms. Lee’s brother, Young Lee, to be notified of the right to attend a hearing.
In 2024, the Maryland Supreme Court ordered the trial court to redo the hearing that had freed Mr. Syed.
