Adnan Syed

1981–present

Adnan Syed Update: Sentence Reduced to Time Served

Adnan Syed, whose murder conviction was the subject of true-crime podcast Serial, will remain free after a Baltimore judge reduced his sentence to time served on March 6. The ruling is the latest update in Syed’s decades-long legal battle to undo his conviction for the 1999 murder of his high school ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.

Syed was found guilty of Lee’s murder in 2000 and was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. More than two decades later, in 2022, a judge vacated his conviction, and prosecutors dropped all charges, effectively exonerating Syed, after new DNA evidence came to light. He was released from prison that September.

However, in March 2023, an appellate court reinstated his conviction due to a procedural error. Maryland’s Supreme Court upheld this decision in August 2024 and ordered a new lower court hearing to determine whether his case should be dismissed.

Judge Jennifer Schiffer, who presided over the 2025 hearing in Baltimore City Circuit Court, wrote in her March decision that Syed is “not a danger to the public and that the interests of justice will be better served by a reduced sentence.”

The new sentence includes the 20 years he already served in prison plus five years of supervised release. While this doesn’t clear the 43-year-old’s name, it effectively marks an end to his fight for freedom.

Adnan Syed was convicted for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in a case made famous when it was featured on the 2014 inaugural season of the podcast Serial. Syed and Lee were both seniors at a Baltimore high school when she disappeared and was subsequently found dead. Syed was sentenced to life in prison with an additional 30 years for first-degree murder, though he has always maintained his innocence. His complex and winding quest for freedom seemingly came to a close in the fall of 2022 when new evidence led prosecutors to drop all charges against Syed as a judge vacated his murder conviction. However, in March 2023, a Maryland appellate court reinstated his conviction due to a procedural issue. Then, in March 2025, a Baltimore judge reduced his sentence to time served. Since his 2022 release from prison, he’s been working at Georgetown University.

FULL NAME: Adnan Masud Syed
BORN: May 21, 1981
BIRTHPLACE: Baltimore, Maryland
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

Adnan Syed was born in Baltimore on May 21, 1981, to conservative Muslim parents, Shamim and Syed Rahman. As the middle child, Syed is one of three sons; Tanveer is his older brother, and Yusuf is his younger brother.

Not much has been reported on Syed’s life or family in detail. At Baltimore’s Woodlawn High School, Syed was popular and a straight-A student. He was the homecoming king and played on the varsity football team and worked part-time for a paramedic service.

Just like Syed, Hae Min Lee was popular at school. The Korean-American was a member of the lacrosse and field hockey team, managed the boys’ wrestling team, and had dreams of being an optician. She and Syed kept their relationship a secret from their conservative immigrant families, but eventually, the secrecy frustrated Lee, which was what purportedly drove a wedge between them. After they broke up, Lee began to date a man named Don Clinedinst, who worked with her at a local LensCrafters.

On January 13, 1999, Lee was reported missing by her family after she failed to come home. Four weeks later, the 18-year-old’s half-buried body was found at Leakin Park in Baltimore by a passerby. According to autopsy reports, she died of manual strangulation.

Watch The Case Against Adnan Syed on Max

During a police investigation, Syed’s friend Jay Wilds confessed he had helped Syed bury Lee’s body. Syed, then a high school senior, was arrested on February 28, 1999, and charged with kidnapping and murdering Lee.

Although prosecutors couldn’t offer any physical evidence against Syed, they used Wilds’ testimony along with the testimony of a corroborating witness, Jennifer Pusateri, who claimed Wilds told her Syed confessed to Lee’s murder and had shown him the body.

According to Wilds, Syed was angry that Lee had broken up with him and murdered her out of revenge. The other piece of evidence that helped the prosecution’s case included cell phone tower records, which corroborated some of Wilds’ timeline of events. Although Syed maintained his innocence, he was convicted in February 2000 of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and false imprisonment and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years.

Since Syed’s conviction, Wilds has changed his story multiple times. Recent analysis of Wilds’ police interviews suggests he was heavily coached by the Baltimore police.

Syed first appealed his case in 2003, to no avail. He appealed again in 2010, this time on the basis of “ineffective assistance of counsel.” Syed claimed his attorney at the time, Cristina Gutierrez, didn’t look into an alibi witness, Asia McClain, who said she was with Syed at Woodlawn High School’s library at the time of the murder. In addition to McClain, Syed’s appeals lawyer also brought into consideration the unreliability of the cell phone tower records evidence from the original trial.

In 2014, journalist and radio personality Sarah Koenig revisited his case on the podcast Serial, which placed doubt on his guilty verdict. The podcast’s popularity catapulted the case into the international spotlight. The media coverage opened up new avenues for Syed and his defense team.

In June 2016, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Martin Welch granted Syed a retrial, a decision the Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld in late March 2018. However, a year later, the state’s highest court rejected the lower court’s decision by a 4-3 vote, denying Syed a retrial. It asserted that, regardless of the shortcomings of Syed’s original legal counsel, the recent evidence being presented wouldn’t have altered the jury’s decision. The U.S. Supreme Court also denied to hear Syed’s case in November 2019, effectively upholding the Maryland court’s decision. However, the case didn’t end there.

Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Melissa M. Phinn vacated Syed’s conviction, effectively setting him free on September 19, 2022. Phinn’s decision came after prosecutors told the court they lost faith in Syed’s conviction in light of new evidence and violations in the government’s turning over evidence. Less than a month later, prosecutors dropped all charges against Syed, eliminating the possibility of a retrial.

Syed has been out of prison since late 2022. In late March 2023, a Maryland appeals court reinstated Syed’s murder conviction after ruling that a lower court didn’t give Hae Min Lee’s family sufficient notice to attend the hearing on the state’s motion to vacate the conviction. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate court ruled this violated state law and the rights of the family and ordered that a new hearing be held. The state’s supreme court affirmed this decision in a 4-3 vote in August 2024.

Less than a year later, in March 2025, a Baltimore judge reduced Syed’s sentence to time served, allowing him to remain out of prison. He will be subject to five years under supervised release. While his conviction still stands, Syed’s fight for freedom has effectively ended.

Following his release from prison, Syed began a full-time job as a program associate for Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative in December 2022. One of his roles is providing support for an undergraduate class called Making an Exoneree, in which students seek to help free innocent people in prison by examining their cases and creating documentaries.

Thanks to the worldwide popularity of Serial, Syed’s case captured public interest and spawned a plethora of media projects.

Rabia Chaudry, an advocate, family friend, and lawyer, launched her own podcast entitled Undisclosed: The State vs. Adnan Syed, and published a book, Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial, in 2016. The same year, witness Asia McClain produced her own book, Confessions of a Serial Alibi, and Investigation Discovery premiered the documentary Adnan Syed: Innocent or Guilty?

In March 2019, HBO launched a four-part documentary entitled The Case Against Adnan Syed, based on the case’s evolution since its broadcast on Serial.

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Colin McEvoy

Senior News Editor, Biography.com

Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy. He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

Catherine Caruso

Associate Profiles Editor

Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.