The prosecutors filed a friends of the court brief with Maryland appeals court

Twenty-one Maryland state attorneys have voiced their opposition to the ruling for a new trial for Adnan Syed, the subject of the wildly popular podcast Serial.

In a friend of the court brief filed Oct. 4 with the Court of Special Appeals in Annapolis and obtained by The Baltimore Sun, the attorneys said the post-conviction court “made a mistake” in its June decision to grant Syed a retrial.

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The prosecutors said they filed the friend of the court brief as “independently-elected, lead prosecutors for jurisdictions who are not parties” to the case.

Prosecutors from Baltimore County and Baltimore City did not join in the friend of the court brief, because the murder occurred in Baltimore County and the body of the victim was found in Baltimore City, according to the filing.

In 2000, Syed was convicted of the 1999 murder of his high school classmate and ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, and sentenced to life in prison.

Syed’s lead attorney, C. Justin Brown, told The Baltimore Sun that the filing is “another example of the extraordinary lengths [to which] the state is going to avoid retrying this case.”

“If the state is so confident in its case, the state should do the right thing and give Syed a fair trial he never received the first time around,” Brown told the newspaper.

The Maryland Deputy Attorney General’s office is appealing the ruling to grant Syed a retrial.

The prosecutors said in the brief that the lower court’s mistake was two-fold: That “settled-law” would not grant him a retrial and that the “sensationalized attention surrounding this case — fueled by supporters of a convicted murderer and left unanswered by a grieving family who has asked that their privacy be respected — should not bear on the just and proper resolution of this appeal.”

The prosecutors also said that Syed had a “more than competent” defense attorney for his 2000 trial, and that he was “convicted by a jury of his peers on crushing evidence of his guilt.”