Hae Min Lee’s brother and state attorney general ask Maryland Supreme Court for victim rights
Crime victims should have the right to speak at hearings to overturn the convictions of people found guilty of harming them, lawyers for the brother of the woman Adnan Syed was once convicted of killing and the state attorney general argued in separate filings to the Supreme Court of Maryland.
The briefs, filed Monday, examine the intent of legislators who created the law allowing prosecutors to move to undo convictions. They ask the state’s highest court to go further than the Appellate Court of Maryland did earlier this year.
In its split ruling in March, the appellate court determined that the rights of Hae Min Lee’s brother, Young Lee, were violated because he was not given ample notice of the hearing that set Syed free and was not allowed to attend in person, though he did appear by video call. The appellate court reinstated Syed’s convictions in Lee’s killing, but said the law was clear that Young Lee didn’t have a right to speak at such a hearing.
“We are urging the Maryland Supreme Court to recognize the right of victims and their representatives to participate meaningfully in the criminal justice system — a right recognized by the Maryland statutory scheme and the Maryland Constitution,” said David Sanford, Young Lee’s lead lawyer, in a statement.
Sanford and attorneys for Syed have competing arguments before the high court, prolonging the legal saga made famous by the “Serial” podcast.
attorney for the family of Hae Min Lee, speaks at a news conference outside the Appellate Court of Maryland building in Annapolis after a hearing.
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Both sides contend that the appellate court erred in its March ruling, but to opposite effects. Syed’s attorneys say the appellate court shouldn’t have reinstated Syed’s convictions in Lee’s death; Lee’s lawyers say that decision was correct, but didn’t go far enough for crime victims in Maryland.
The Office of Maryland attorney General Anthony Brown, which represents state’s attorneys offices on appeals, largely supported Young Lee’s position in its own brief filed with the high court Monday.
In February 1999, weeks after Lee went missing, a maintenance worker found her body in a clandestine grave in Baltimore’s Leakin Park. Homicide detectives soon focused their investigation on Syed. Then 17 and a popular honors student at Woodlawn High School, Syed had dated Lee. At trial, prosecutors said he couldn’t handle it when Lee broke up with him, and strangled her during a struggle in her car.
A jury in 2000 convicted Syed of murder, kidnapping, robbery and false imprisonment in Hae Min Lee’s death. A judge sentenced him to life plus 30 years in prison.
Syed served 23 years in prison before walking free in September, following a protracted effort by his latest lawyer to win his freedom. Public defender Erica Suter had approached Baltimore prosecutors the year before, advocating that her client was a good fit to be released from prison under a new law that allowed people sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed as minors to have their sentences modified.
Suter’s approach spawned a full review of Syed’s case by the state’s attorney’s office, then led by Marilyn Mosby. That reinvestigation culminated with prosecutors filing a motion to undo Syed’s conviction, arguing that he didn’t receive a fair trial on several fronts.
[ A timeline of Adnan Syed’s journey through Baltimore’s criminal justice system ]
After the state moved to overturn Syed’s conviction, Judge Melissa Phinn had a meeting Friday, Sept. 16, with the prosecutor and Syed’s defense attorney in her chambers. During that meeting, Phinn scheduled a hearing to decide whether to vacate Syed’s conviction for Sept. 19, the following Monday.
The prosecutor, Becky Feldman, who has since left the state’s attorney’s office, notified Young Lee about the hearing shortly after it was scheduled. Feldman informed Young Lee, who lived in California at the time, that he could attend the hearing by video call.
In their latest plea to the supreme court, Young Lee’s attorneys argue that amount of notice amounted to “an empty formality” at odds with the principles enshrined in the state constitution that crime victims be treated with “dignity, respect and sensitivity.”
In court in September, Phinn found that prosecutors provided Young Lee enough of a heads up. The law says that crime victims be provided with “reasonable” notice of a hearing to vacate a conviction, without prescribing a specific length.
Phinn allowed Young Lee to speak by video call about the possibility of Syed’s conviction being overturned, though the law did not require her to do so. Though the appellate court ordered a redo of the September hearing, it found that the presiding judge didn’t have to let Young Lee participate.
Victims generally aren’t allowed to weigh in on legal determinations; those decisions are up for attorneys to argue, and the judge to decide based on the law. Victims or their representatives, however, are allowed to speak at certain types of proceedings, like sentencing hearings.
Syed’s attorneys say vacating a conviction is purely a legal question, precluding victims from having an input.
In its filing Monday, the attorney general’s office disagreed, citing a provision of Maryland law that says victims have a right to address the judge at any hearing that could alter a sentence.
“If a victim has the right to address the court before the mere alteration of a sentence, surely a victim has the same right to address the court when a sentence may be vacated entirely,” Assistant attorney General Derek Simmonsen wrote.
Young Lee’s lawyers said the Maryland General Assembly meant to give victims the right to speak at hearings to vacate convictions, quoting lawmakers and stakeholders who said as much during legislative hearings in 2019.
His legal team also argued that Phinn vacated Syed’s conviction without critically reviewing the evidence prosecutors cited. Phinn reviewed some evidence during the meeting with the prosecutor and defense attorney in her chambers.
In court in September, Feldman essentially recited her motion to vacate Syed’s conviction. She also read aloud an affidavit she authored explaining how she came across notes from the prosecutor who tried Syed in 2000, which Feldman and Syed’s attorney say were not disclosed to his defense lawyer ahead of trial and contained information that could have been used to suggest his innocence.
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Feldman said publicizing the notes would jeopardize her office’s investigation into the two alternative suspects she identified during her review of Syed’s case.
The notes were not admitted as evidence at the hearing, and Young Lee’s lawyers say he never saw them.
“In so evidently failing to substantiate its allegations, the State demonstrated that it was set on a specific outcome despite its lack of necessary proof,” Young Lee’s lawyers wrote in the filing. “The circuit court ruled that the State had met its burden for vacatur but did so without analysis, merely quoting the legal standard.”
Through his lawyers, Young Lee gave notice of his intention to appeal shortly after the September hearing. At Mosby’s discretion, Feldman dismissed the charges against Syed in October.
Syed’s attorneys say the decision to drop Syed’s case voided Young Lee’s appeal.
Even if it didn’t, as the appellate court ruled, they say any of the errors identified during appellate review wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the hearing. That legal concept they cited is known as the harmlessness doctrine, and posits that appellate courts should only overrule a trial court’s legal error if the appeals court believes the mistake directly impacted the outcome of the case.
In Syed’s case, Simmonsen wrote, “the harm was not that Lee could not control the outcome of the case, but, rather, that the Declaration of Rights and the Criminal Procedure Article afford dignity and access to the victims of crime, and here, the court’s conduct took it away.”
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