Adnan Syed cries outside court after judges question whether Hae Min Lee’s family has a case

Adnan Syed was crying outside court after three Maryland Court of Appeals judges questioned whether they had the authority to reinstate his decades-old murder conviction.

Syed, whose case was featured on the hit podcast Serial, was released last year after a judge overturned his sentence for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.

While Lee’s family appealed the reversal that freed Syed after 23 years behind bars, his lawyers were left with nothing when Justices Stuart Berger, Kathryn Graeff and Gregory Wells pressed them Thursday on why the charges should not be thrown out. charges.

Speaking publicly for the first time about his case, Syed told reporters: “Our family has suffered a lot in the last 20, almost 24 years. It is very difficult for us.

‘It’s hard for my dad; it’s hard for my mom; it’s hard for my little brother.’

Syed spent more than two decades behind bars after he was found guilty of killing Hae Min Lee, an ex-girlfriend seen with him above in a high school photo. The case became widely known after it was featured on the debut of the Serial podcast.

Syed was convicted of murder in 2000, but in September, the court ruled that DNA collected from Lee’s shoes did not match Syed’s, finding that prosecutors failed to provide the defense with evidence that could have exonerated him.

However, Lee’s family argued that neither the prosecutor nor the court provided the evidence they used to reverse Syed’s conviction and claimed they held the hearing to release him in private.

However, when Graeff lobbied the Lee family’s lawyer, David Sanford, for legal precedent on why the reversal should be overturned, the lawyer admitted he had no examples. the baltimore sun reports.

“I don’t have any case law for support in Maryland,” Sanford told the judges.

Weeping outside the courtroom on Thursday, Syed asked the court to consider the damage his family has suffered as it weighs its future.

“It seems like our family, we just kind of go under the radar,” Syed said. ‘Every time we go to court we go unnoticed.

“We definitely understand that Hae’s family has suffered so much and they continue to suffer. And it is that we also suffer. And we hope that today’s court will take note of that.’

Syed asked the court to spare his family further heartache after he was released last year. Pictured: Syed making his first public appeal to journalists on Thursday.

A Maryland court decided to free Syed after an investigation showed that the DNA on Lee’s shoe did not match his own and that his first prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense that could have exonerated him.

Sanford claimed that the Lee family was denied their right to fully participate in the proceeding because they were not given proper notice, facts, or evidence.

“There are a lot of violations here of the law and there are mistakes made here by the court,” Sanford said. CBS. “If Adnan Syed is in fact innocent, it was a terrible judicial error and we will be the first to say it, once there is a proper evidentiary hearing.”

While the three-judge panel debated whether or not the case was “moot,” as Berger put it, they seemed sympathetic to the Lee family over the speed at which Syed’s charges were dropped.

Erica Suter, Syed’s attorney, advocated for the court to uphold the reversal, also citing the fact that her client’s story and problems with the court system were highlighted on the popular Serial podcast.

“This court’s decision will not bring Hae Min Lee back or restore Adnan’s lost 23 1/2 years, but what it can do is confirm that the lower court’s decision should be upheld,” Suter said.

“Adnan, his family and I want to thank the tens of thousands around the world who heard his story and believe in him, who believe in the ability of our system to correct its mistakes, even in difficult cases.”

In addition to dismissing the appeal, the appeals court could also issue a new hearing on the decision to release Syed.

It usually takes weeks or months for the court to issue a ruling, the Sun noted.

Hae Min Lee, right, was just 18 years old when she was strangled and buried in a shallow grave in Baltimore’s Leakin Park in 1999. Syed, right, has repeatedly raised questions about the evidence against her.

In the photo, Youn Kim, Hae Min Lee’s mother, is escorted from her daughter’s memorial service. The family is now seeking to appeal a Maryland court’s decision to vacate Syed’s conviction.

Hae Min Lee was just 18 years old when she was strangled to death and buried in a shallow grave in Baltimore’s Leakin Park in 1999.

Syed has maintained his innocence for decades and caught the attention of millions in 2014 when the first season of Serial focused on the case and raised questions about some of the evidence used against him, including data from cell phone towers.

Prosecutors previously said that a new investigation of the case revealed evidence about the possible involvement of two alternative suspects.

The two suspects may have been involved individually or together, the state’s attorney’s office said.

One of the suspects had threatened Lee, saying that he would “make her (Ms. Lee) disappear. He would kill her,’ according to a court filing.

The suspects were people known at the time of the original investigation and were not properly ruled out or disclosed to the defense, prosecutors said.