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BALTIMORE: Despite documented problems with the evidence against him and an earlier request from prosecutors to clear his record, Adnan Syed will remain a convicted murderer, according to court papers filed Tuesday night.
The decision from Baltimore prosecutors comes ahead of a scheduled hearing Wednesday morning where a judge will consider whether to reduce Syed’s sentence, but this means the conviction itself is no longer in question.
It is the latest wrinkle in an ongoing legal odyssey that garnered a massive following after being featured in the “Serial” podcast over a decade ago.
Syed’s attorneys recently filed the request for a sentence reduction under Maryland’s Juvenile Restoration Act, a relatively new state law that provides a potential pathway to release for people serving long prison terms for crimes committed when they were minors. That request is supported by prosecutors.
Meanwhile, Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates announced Tuesday that his office is withdrawing a previously filed motion to vacate Syed’s conviction in the 1999 killing of his high school ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, who was found strangled to death and buried in a makeshift grave.
“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,” Bates said in a statement.
The original motion to vacate — which was filed by Bates’ predecessor Marilyn Mosby — won Syed his freedom in 2022. But his conviction was reinstated following a procedural challenge from Lee’s family. The Maryland Supreme Court ordered a redo of the conviction vacatur hearing after finding that the family didn’t receive adequate notice to attend in person.
Since the prosecutor’s office changed hands in the meantime, the decision of whether to withdraw the motion fell to Bates.
Instead of asking a judge to again consider Syed’s guilt or innocence, Bates chose a different path. He supported Syed’s motion for a reduced sentence — without addressing the underlying conviction.
Bates said that since his release in 2022, Syed has demonstrated he is a productive member of society whose continued freedom is “in the interest of justice.” He said the case “is precisely what legislators envisioned when they crafted the Juvenile Restoration Act.”
The legislation was passed amid growing consensus that such defendants are especially open to rehabilitation, partly because brain science shows cognitive development continues well beyond the teenage years. Syed was 17 when Lee was killed.
Now 43, he has been working at Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative and caring for aging relatives since his release, according to court filings. His father died in October after a long illness.
Bates was facing a Friday deadline to decide on the motion to vacate.
After reviewing the motion filed by his predecessor, Bates concluded that it contained “false and misleading statements that undermine the integrity of the judicial process,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
Attorneys for the victim’s family had argued that prosecutors should address the integrity of Syed’s conviction before the court considered reducing his sentence. Prosecutors “should not be allowed to duck the issue by hiding behind” his motion for a reduced sentence, attorneys wrote in a recent filing.
Syed has maintained his innocence from the beginning, but many questions remain unanswered even after the “Serial” podcast combed through the evidence, reexamined legal arguments and interviewed witnesses. The series debuted in 2014 and drew millions of listeners who became armchair detectives.
Rife with legal twists and turns, the case has recently pitted criminal justice reform efforts against the rights of crime victims and their families, whose voices are often at odds with a growing movement to acknowledge and correct systemic racism, police misconduct and prosecutorial missteps.
When prosecutors sought to vacate Syed’s conviction in 2022, they cited numerous problems with the case, including alternative suspects and unreliable evidence presented at trial. A judge agreed to vacate the conviction and free Syed. Prosecutors in Mosby’s office later chose not to refile charges after they said DNA testing excluded Syed as a suspect.
Even though the appellate courts reinstated his conviction, they allowed Syed to remain free while the case continued.

WASHINGTON: Five Microsoft employees were ejected from a meeting with the company’s chief executive for protesting contracts to provide artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli military.
The protest on Monday came after an investigation by The Associated Press revealed last week that sophisticated AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI had been used as part of an Israeli military program to select bombing targets during the recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon. The story also contained details of an errant Israeli airstrike in 2023 that struck a vehicle carrying members of a Lebanese family, killing three young girls and their grandmother.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was speaking about new products at an employee town hall meeting at the company’s corporate campus in Redmond, Washington. Workers standing about 15 feet to his right then revealed T-shirts that when they stood side-by-side spelled out the question “Does Our Code Kill Kids, Satya?“
Photos and video of the incident, which was live streamed throughout the company, shows Nadella kept speaking and did not acknowledge the protesters. Two men quickly tapped the workers on the shoulders and ushered them out of the room.
“We provide many avenues for all voices to be heard,” Microsoft said in a statement provided to the AP. “Importantly, we ask that this be done in a way that does not cause a business disruption. If that happens, we ask participants to relocate. We are committed to ensuring our business practices uphold the highest standards.”
Microsoft did not answer Tuesday when asked whether the employees involved in the protest would face disciplinary action. The company also previously declined to comment about the AP’s Feb. 18 story about its contracts with the Israeli military.
In October, Microsoft fired two workers for helping organize an unauthorized lunchtime vigil for Palestinian refugees at its headquarters. Microsoft said at the time that it ended the employment of some people “in accordance with internal policy” but declined to give details.
A group of workers has been raising concerns within the company for months about Microsoft providing services to the Israeli military through its Azure cloud computing platform. Some employees at the company have also spoken out in support of Israel and said those supporting Palestinians have made them feel unsafe.
The AP’s investigation included exclusive details drawn from internal company data and documents, including that the usage of AI models by the Israeli military through Azure increased nearly 200 times after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas militants.
The AP’s report was shared and discussed among Microsoft employees on social media and within the company’s internal systems. In a community forum designated for employees to raise concerns with senior leadership, an employee shared links to the AP report. More than a dozen others questioned whether the company was violating its stated principles to defend human rights and not to let its AI models be used to harm people, according to screenshots reviewed by the AP.
Abdo Mohamed, a researcher and data scientist who was one of the Microsoft workers fired over the October vigil, said the company is prioritizing profits over its own human rights commitments.
“The demands are clear,” said Mohamed, who works with a group of Microsoft workers called No Azure for Apartheid. “Satya Nadella and Microsoft executives need to answer to their workers by dropping contracts with the Israeli military.”