BALTIMORE — Maryland’s Supreme Court reinstated Adnan Syed’s convictions in a ruling Friday, sending the case back to Baltimore Circuit Court.

Adnan Syed and his mother Shamim Rahman outside Maryland’s Supreme Court in Annapolis, Md. last Oct. Susan Walsh/Associated Press, file

The order essentially restarts the process after the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office filed a motion to vacate Syed’s conviction for the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee, who was strangled to death and buried in a clandestine grave in Baltimore’s Leakin Park, citing a violation of her brother Young Lee’s right to participate in the subsequent hearing.

“On remand, the parties and Mr. Lee will begin where they were immediately after the State’s Attorney filed the motion to vacate,” the court wrote in an opinion published online Friday morning.

The decision comes nearly 11 months after state Supreme Court justices questioned lawyers for Syed and Lee at an oral argument on Oct. 6.

Syed’s legal saga rose to international renown with the hit podcast, “Serial,” which debuted in 2014. The show examined Hae Min Lee’s killing as well as the subsequent prosecution of Syed, her former high school sweetheart.

A jury in 2000 found Syed guilty of murder and related charges in Lee’s death, with a judge later sentencing Syed to life plus 30 years in prison. The convictions withstood numerous appeals from Syed, who maintained his innocence as years turned to decades behind bars.

His break came in 2021 when Baltimore prosecutors began reviewing his case in consideration of a new law allowing people convicted of crimes before they turned 18 to petition a court to reconsider their penalty. The review spawned a full-throttled reinvestigation of the case, which, prosecutors said, revealed alternative suspects in Lee’s killing not before disclosed to Syed.

The revelation led prosecutors to lose faith in the “integrity” of his decades-old conviction. They moved to vacate the guilty findings and Syed walked free after 23 years behind bars in September 2022.

Questions, however, loomed about the hearing to undo Syed’s convictions.

On a late Friday afternoon, the judge who presided scheduled the proceeding for the following Monday. Prosecutors then informed Hae Min Lee’s brother, Young Lee, saying he could watch the hearing via Zoom, but a lawyer for Young Lee insisted his client, who lived in California, wanted to attend in person and wasn’t given enough time to travel.

Though he was allowed to speak at the hearing by Zoom, Young Lee filed an appeal before prosecutors dismissed Syed’s charges in October of that year, arguing the short notice violated his rights as a crime victim. The intermediate Appellate Court of Maryland sided with Lee, ordering in March 2023 that Syed’s convictions be reinstated for a do-over of the hearing to vacate them.

Syed promptly appealed to the state Supreme Court, which held off on reinstating his charges while it considered whether to take up his case, and Young Lee followed suit, arguing the appeals court’s ruling didn’t go far enough for crime victims. Last June, the Supreme Court accepted and combined the dueling appeals from Syed and Lee.