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.
Adnan Syed’s murder conviction still stands as he seeks sentence reduction in ‘Serial’ case
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Adnan Syed’s murder conviction still stands as he seeks sentence reduction in ‘Serial’ case
- 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
Foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Central Europe leads to animal culls and border closures
- The virus, which primarily affects cloven-hooved animals and poses little risk to humans, has led to mass culling of cattle and widespread border closures
The outbreak was first detected on a cattle farm in northwestern Hungary in early March, and animals on three farms in neighboring Slovakia tested positive for the highly transmissible virus two weeks later.
Since then, animals from an additional three farms in Hungary and another three in Slovakia have tested positive for the virus, the first outbreak of the disease in either country in more than half a century.
“Everything is completely upside down” in the area as farmers fear for their own herds and transportation is disrupted by border closures, said Sándor Szoboszlai, a local entrepreneur and hunter in the Hungarian town of Levél where nearly 3,000 cattle had to be culled after the disease was discovered on a farm.
“We didn’t even think such a thing could happen. Who could count on that? Nobody,” he said. “There are big farms in the area, but I don’t think it was the fault of the animal owners, that’s for sure. The wind blew it here.”
Foot-and-mouth disease primarily affects cloven-hooved animals like cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and deer, and results in fevers and blisters in the mouth and hooves. The virus spreads through contact between animals, or on surfaces like clothing, skin and vehicles, or on the wind. It poses little danger to humans.
On Friday, authorities in Hungary continued to conduct operations aimed at stopping the spread of the disease and disinfecting affected farms and vehicles in the area. Mats doused in a powerful disinfectant were placed at the entrances and exits of towns and villages across the region to eliminate virus molecules that may cling to tires — though many of those mats quickly went dry and were swept partially off the road by passing vehicles.
This week, the Slovakian government, citing insufficient containment measures by Hungary, closed 16 of their common borders and one with Austria, all of them lesser-trafficked crossings so authorities can focus on conducting border checks at the major ones. Last week, Austria — where there have been no reported cases — closed 23 of its border crossings with Hungary and Slovakia.
Authorities in the Czech Republic, relatively distant from the Hungarian and Slovakian farms where the disease has been detected, have introduced disinfection measures at all the five border crossings used by freight trucks entering the country.
Jiri Cerny, associate professor at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, said the most significant risk of transmission is “through contaminated human objects” such as ”tires and cars, on the soles of shoes, and through contaminated food.” The Czech Agriculture Minister, Marek Výborný, has said the restrictions could be lifted 30 days after the last farm animal infected with foot-and-mouth disease has been culled in Slovakia.
No new infections have been discovered in Hungary this week, and the cleanup of the last infected farms will likely be completed on Saturday, István Nagy, Hungary’s agricultural minister said on Friday.
Earlier this week, a Hungarian official said in a news conference that the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak may have been caused by “an artificially produced virus.”
Without citing specific evidence to back his claims, Gergely Gulyás, chief of staff to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, said it couldn’t be ruled out that the disease had been released in Hungary as a “biological attack,” adding that the suspicion was based on verbal statements from a laboratory in a foreign country that had begun initial analysis of viral samples.
Hungary’s government has promised to institute a loan payment moratorium for affected farmers, and to help compensate them for the loss of their animals and assist in developing measures on farms to prevent future outbreaks.
Szoboszlai, the hunter in Levél, choked up when speaking about the local farmer who had to cull his entire herd when the virus appeared, saying the situation was “terrible.”
“I feel so sorry for him, because this is his life’s work,” he said. “It will be very difficult to start over.”
Frustrated families await news days after 222 killed in Dominican club disaster
- Aerial images of the site showed a scene resembling the aftermath of an earthquake, with a gaping hole where the club’s roof had been
- The president’s office had earlier put the final death toll at 221, with 189 people pulled alive from the rubble
Santo Domingo: Frustration grew Friday in the Dominican Republic as families of some of the 222 people killed in a nightclub roof collapse three days earlier waited for their loved ones’ bodies to be identified.
Dozens of desperate relatives waited in tents at the forensic morgue in Santo Domingo, the capital city where the Jet Set club’s roof caved in on hundreds of people gathered to see merengue singer Rubby Perez in the early hours of Tuesday.
Perez was on stage when disaster struck, and the 69-year-old was given a sendoff Thursday at the National Theater attended by President Luis Abinader and the singer’s daughter Zulinka, who had escaped the calamity alive.
Many other families, though, still await closure before they can start the grieving process following the Caribbean nation’s worst tragedy in decades.
“It is distressing, it is something you cannot imagine... the wait for the bodies is exasperating,” cried Yuni Garcia, who lost her brother, a club security guard, but has yet to recover his corpse.
The president’s office had earlier put the final death toll at 221, with 189 people pulled alive from the rubble of the popular nightclub now reduced to mounds of twisted steel, zinc and brick.
But a woman injured in the collapse has died after being sent to a hospital, the national health agency announced on Friday evening.
Aerial images of the site showed a scene resembling the aftermath of an earthquake, with a gaping hole where the club’s roof had been.
A video posted on social media showed the venue, which could hold 1,700 guests, suddenly plunged into darkness while Perez was singing, followed by crashing sounds and screams.
’Days of uncertainty’
Waiting at the morgue Friday was Esperanza Dominguez, who told AFP she had yet to find her missing relative’s face in photos of the dead being circulated by forensic teams working to identify the victims.
“I am worn out, I am going crazy because... of the many things I have seen,” she said near a large screen displaying the names of identified victims.
Fany Martinez, 46, waited for news on her sister who lived in Spain and was in Santo Domingo on a visit.
“We have been waiting for many days, many days of uncertainty... It has been very hard, it has been very difficult for us,” she said.
The extent of the tragedy has outstripped capacity.
Health Minister Victor Atallah said Thursday that “no pathology institute has the capacity to handle so many bodies so quickly.”
He had vowed, however, that “no one will be left unidentified... We are going to move every last stone that needs to be moved.”
Authorities said that by Friday, 191 autopsies had been done. They vowed all will be completed by Friday, and victims’ remains will be returned to their families by 2:00 am on Saturday.
Some reported errors, however.
“They gave us a body that wasn’t hers,” said a distraught Julio Alberto Acosta, who lost his stepdaughter in the tragedy.
“They gave us a bag and we said we had to open it to see if it was her, but it wasn’t... We want them to give us the right one so her mom can see her and go to bury her.”
The preliminary victims list included a Haitian, an Italian, two French citizens and, according to the US State Department, “several” Americans.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke to Abinader Friday “to express his deepest condolences,” department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The victims also included two retired Major League Baseball players and a provincial governor.
What, why, how
Twelve extra forensic pathologists were brought on board to aid in the identification process, according to the health ministry.
The mayor’s office had provided six funeral homes with 170 coffins free of charge.
The government has extended an initial three-day national mourning period for another three days to Sunday and announced the creation of a special commission of national and foreign experts to determine the cause of the disaster.
Hundreds of rescuers, aided by sniffer dogs, have worked tirelessly since Tuesday to pull survivors from the rubble.
They called off the search for live victims late Wednesday and shifted their focus to recovering the dead.
Abinader on Friday pledged to find out “what happened, why it happened, how it happened.”
‘Mr Satan’ charged with Trump assassination threat, Justice Department says
- Officials said Shawn Monper was detained and charged with “making threats to assault and murder” Trump and other US officials
- Monper is coincidentally from Butler, Pennsylvania where Trump was nearly assassinated during a campaign rally in July 2024
WASHINGTON: A US man posting content online as “Mr Satan” has been charged with threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump and other government officials, the Department of Justice announced Friday.
Shawn Monper, 32, was detained and charged in a federal criminal complaint with “making threats to assault and murder” Trump and other US officials, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
In a statement, the DOJ said the FBI received an emergency message about threats posted on YouTube by a user who identified himself as “Mr Satan,” whose Internet activity was determined to correspond with Monper’s residence.
Monper is coincidentally from Butler, Pennsylvania where Trump was nearly assassinated during a campaign rally in July.
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January, Monper obtained a firearms permit and commented from his account that he had “bought several guns and been stocking up on ammo since Trump got in office,” the DOJ said.
On February 17 he wrote: “Nah, we just need to start killing people, Trump, Elon, all the heads of agencies Trump appointed, and anyone who stands in the way,” referring to Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk.
“Remember, we are the majority, MAGA is a minority of the country, and by the time its time to make the move, they will be weakened, many will be crushed by these policies, and they will want revenge too. American Revolution 2.0,” he said, according to the DOJ.
Then on March 4, in a YouTube video titled “Live: Trump’s address to Congress,” Monper said he was “going to assassinate him myself,” the DOJ added.
Monper hails from Butler township, scene of a shooting last July 13 that nearly took Trump’s life, when a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed the Republican’s ear at an outdoor campaign rally. One person was killed and three were injured.
“Rest assured that whenever and wherever threats of assassination or mass violence occur, this Department of Justice will find, arrest, and prosecute the suspect to the fullest extent of the law and seek the maximum appropriate punishment,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in the statement.
A detention hearing is scheduled for April 14.
US senators ask SEC for Trump insider trading probe
- Trump posted on his website Truth Social early Wednesday that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” as stock markets were tanking
- A few hours later, Trump announced a 90-day suspension of additional tariffs against some countries, triggering a historic stock market rebound
WASHINGTON: A group of US senators on Friday urged the government’s markets watchdog to investigate whether President Donald Trump or White House insiders broke securities laws ahead of his dramatic reversal on global tariffs.
The six Democrats — led by Massachusetts progressive Elizabeth Warren — noted in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Trump posted on his website Truth Social early Wednesday that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” as stock markets were tanking.
A few hours later, Trump announced a 90-day suspension of additional tariffs against dozens of countries, triggering a historic stock market rebound and the best day for the S&P 500 since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
“We urge the SEC to investigate whether the tariff announcements... enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public,” senators wrote in a letter to regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The letter urged the SEC to probe whether “any insiders, including the president’s family, had prior knowledge of the tariff pause that they abused to make stock trades ahead of the president’s announcement.”
Trump signed his Truth Social post with the letters “DJT” — both his initials and the stock market abbreviation for his media company, Trump Media & Technology Group.
The company’s shares closed up 21.67 percent on Wednesday.
“Corruption and lawlessness”
The senators called on the SEC to investigate whether the president, his donors or other insiders had engaged in market manipulation, insider trading or other violations of securities laws.
SEC chairman Paul Atkins has history with Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, who has accused him of having conflicts of interest over his ties to the financial services industry.
Atkins is not obliged to do what the senators ask, and four of the group followed up with a second letter to the National Association of Attorneys General asking for state-level investigations.
“Corruption and lawlessness have become a calling card of the Trump administration,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of the signatories of both letters.
The demand for action came amid concern over the growing number of avenues through which Trump and his family can monetize the power of the presidency, although no evidence of corruption had emerged.
Days before his inauguration, Trump released a “memecoin” — a digital cryptocurrency token with no inherent value — opening the door for secret donations from foreign buyers.
“Now anyone in world can essentially deposit money into bank account of President of USA with a couple clicks,” his former aide Anthony Scaramucci posted on social media after the launch.
“Every favor — geopolitical, corporate or personal — is now on sale, right out in the open.”
The White House told The Washington Post that Trump’s Truth Social post sought only to “reassure” the public and that he had a responsibility to “reassure markets and Americans about their economic security.”
US prosecutors seek release of ex-FBI informant who admitted fabricating claims against Biden
- The move is the latest by the Trump administration to reverse cases against supporters of President Trump or those who aided conservative causes
- Smirnov pleaded guilty in December to fabricating bribery claims against former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter
WASHINGTON: US prosecutors plan to review the case of a former FBI informant who admitted to fabricating bribery claims against former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, according to a court filing on Friday.
The disclosure came as prosecutors, together with defense lawyers for the informant, Alexander Smirnov, asked a federal judge to release him from prison while he appeals a six-year prison sentence.
“The United States intends to review the government’s theory of the case underlying Defendant’s criminal conviction,” prosecutors wrote in a filing in Los Angeles federal court.
The move is the latest by the US Justice Department during the Trump administration to review or dismiss cases against supporters of President Donald Trump or those who aided conservative causes.
Smirnov pleaded guilty in December to causing the creation of a false record after falsely telling his FBI handler years earlier that he had knowledge of bribes paid by executives at a Ukrainian energy company to Joe and Hunter Biden. He also admitted to tax evasion.
Smirnov’s claims, documented in an FBI record, briefly became the focus of a Republican-led impeachment investigation into Joe Biden that was later abandoned.
The case was brought by former Special Counsel David Weiss, who separately indicted Hunter Biden on tax and gun crimes. Joe Biden later issued a sweeping pardon for his son.
In seeking his release, prosecutors agreed that Smirnov was not likely to flee or pose a threat to public safety. His travel would be limited largely to Nevada, where he lived, according to the filing. It is not clear how the Justice Department review could impact the case. Smirnov already struck a plea agreement with prosecutors.
His appeal has so far been limited to arguing that his time spent in pretrial detention should count toward his six-year sentence.
