Syed free after judge overturns his 1999 murder conviction

Adnan Syed, the man whose legal saga spawned the hit podcast ‘‘Serial,’’ walked away from a Baltimore courthouse free of shackles after 23 years, presumed innocent in the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee.

Syed descended the stairs to the Elijah E. Cummings Courthouse to cheers.

Baltimore Circuit Judge Melissa Phinn yesterday overturned Syed’s murder conviction in the homicide after prosecutors and Syed’s attorney raised doubts about his guilty finding because of the revelation of alternative suspects in the homicide and unreliable evidence used against him at trial.

Phinn ordered officers to unshackle Syed in court and mandated he wear a GPS monitor while the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office chooses whether to drop his charges or to try him again for murder in his ex-girlfriend’s death. Prosecutors have 30 days to make that decision, Phinn said.

The judge said her ruling was in the ‘‘interest of justice and fairness.’’

Syed, 41, has always maintained his innocence.

Hae Min Lee, 18, was strangled to death and buried in a clandestine grave in Leakin Park. Authorities at the time said they suspected that Syed, her ex-boyfriend, struggled with her in a car before killing her. The state’s theory? The popular honours student at Woodlawn High School couldn’t handle it when Lee broke up with him. He was 17 at the time of his arrest, and has been behind bars for 23 years.

Syed was stoic when Phinn spoke; his family member gasped, wept and embraced.

In the state’s motion to overturn his conviction, prosecutors wrote not that they believed Syed was innocent, but that they no longer had faith in the integrity of his conviction.

‘‘It is in the interests of justice and fairness that these convictions be vacated and that the defendant, at a minimum, be afforded a new trial,’’ wrote Becky Feldman, chief of the State’s Attorney’s Office’s Sentencing Review Unit.

Syed’s first trial in 1999 ended with a mistrial. In 2000, a jury found him guilty of murder. The judge handed down life plus 30 years in prison at sentencing.

Despite fighting to uphold the conviction in years past, prosecutors now say Syed may not be Lee’s killer. According to their motion to vacate his conviction, the state has known since 1999 of two ‘‘alternative suspects’’ who may have killed Lee.

One of the suspects had threatened her, saying ‘‘he would make her disappear. He would kill her,’’ prosecutors wrote.

The state did not disclose the alternative suspects to Syed’s defence before trial, meaning his attorneys couldn’t use that information to argue his innocence to a jury. – TNS