BALTIMORE — Baltimore prosecutors are still mulling what to do with the case of Adnan Syed, whose decades-old convictions were reinstated earlier this year.

At a status conference in Syed’s case Friday, prosecutor Clara Salzberg, chief of the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office’s Post Conviction Litigation Unit, said her team needed more time to decide what to do with a request to vacate Syed’s convictions filed by the previous administration in the state’s attorney’s office.

“We are asking for an additional 90 days … to allow us to take the time that we need to conduct the review of what was filed and to determine what are the appropriate next steps for our office to take,” Salzberg said.

Syed’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Erica Suter, did not object to the prosecutor’s request. Also the director of the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Suter didn’t say anything else during the brief court hearing.

David Sanford, an attorney for Young Lee, the brother of the woman Syed is accused of killing in 1999, Hae Min Lee, said he would object to any further delays in the case.

“The office claims it needs an additional three months to review documents it has had for over two years,” Sanford said, adding, “At this point, this is frankly absurd.”

That prosecutors are still mulling how to proceed in this case adds intrigue to a legal saga made famous by the hit podcast “Serial,” which chronicled Syed’s prosecutions. The Supreme Court of Maryland reinstated Syed’s convictions in August, capping off an appeals process dating to September 2022and placing Syed’s fate in the hands of a new state’s attorney.

Though the state’s attorney’s office successfully moved to vacate Syed’s convictions in September 2022, the office doesn’t have to take the same position now that the Supreme Court has ordered a redo of the hearing that set Syed free.

On the campaign trail, Bates said Syed’s convictions should be undone. When his office received the case following the state Supreme Court’s ruling, he said they needed to evaluate the case.

“Ninety days is what we’re confident today will at least give us the time that we need to have more clarity about what our next steps will be,” Salzberg told Baltimore Circuit Judge Jennifer B. Schiffer, who is now presiding over the case.

Schiffer ordered prosecutors to file anything new in the case by Feb. 28.

Syed’s legal saga traces to 2000 when a Baltimore jury found Syed guilty of murder, kidnapping, robbery and related charges in the death of Lee, his high school sweetheart. Prosecutors postulated at the time that Syed couldn’t handle it when Lee broke up with him, so he killed her.

Lee, 18, was strangled to death and buried in a clandestine grave in Leakin Park.

Syed’s convictions withstood multiple appeals, but he always maintained he was innocent. Years turned to decades behind bars.

His break came in 2021 when Suter approached city prosecutors about modifying his sentence under a new law allowing people convicted of crimes before they turned 18 to petition a court to change their penalty. The subsequent 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, prosecutors said, led them to doubt the “integrity” of Syed’s decades-old convictions. They moved to vacate the guilty findings.

On a Friday afternoon in September 2022, Baltimore Circuit Judge Melissa M. Phinn scheduled a hearing for the following Monday. Prosecutors then informed Young Lee, saying he could watch it by 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.

Phinn proceeded with the hearing, ordering Syed freed after 23 years of incarceration.

Young Lee raised questions about his role in the hearing, appealing before prosecutors dismissed Syed’s charges in October 2022. He argued that the short notice violated his right as a crime victim and the intermediate Appellate Court of Maryland agreed in March 2023, ordering Syed’s convictions reinstated for a do-over of the hearing to vacate them.

Syed swiftly appealed to the state’s highest court, arguing that Young Lee got adequate notice and that the prosecutor’s decision to dismiss his charges nullified the appeal. Young Lee followed up with his own appeal, with his lawyers arguing the appellate court’s ruling didn’t go far enough for crime victims.

The state Supreme Court’s decision was split. The three dissenting judges argued, in part, that it was up to the legislature, not the judiciary, to decide whether to clarify a crime victim’s role in such a proceeding.

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