Killing of Hae Min Lee

Hae Min Lee (Korean: 이해민; born October 15, 1980) was a Korean-American high school student who went missing on January 13, 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland, before turning up dead on February 9, 1999, when her corpse was discovered in Leakin Park, Baltimore. Her autopsy revealed that she had been killed by way of manual strangulation.

Amidst an ongoing investigation by the Baltimore Police Department, Lee's ex-boyfriend Adnan Masud Syed (Urdu: عدنان مسعود سید; born May 21, 1981) was arrested on February 28, 1999, and put on trial for homicide. He was found guilty on all counts for the charges of kidnapping, false imprisonment, robbery, and first-degree murder; Syed was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years, without the possibility of parole. In 2014, the investigative journalism podcast Serial covered the events of Lee's killing, bringing renewed attention to Syed's case. In 2016, judge Martin P. Welch vacated Syed's conviction and ordered a new trial. While this decision was upheld by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in 2018, it was ultimately overturned by the Maryland Court of Appeals in 2019.

Following an investigation by prosecutors that uncovered new evidence, a judge again vacated Syed's conviction in September 2022. In October 2022, prosecutors announced that the charges against Syed had been dropped, effectively exonerating him. However, in March 2023, Syed's conviction was reinstated by an appellate court, although the court stayed the effective date of the decision for 60 days. In May, the Supreme Court of Maryland extended the stay of the conviction reinstatement pending the resolution of the appeal.