Three’s Company: The Supreme Court of Maryland Elevates Victims to Quasi-Party Status and Invites Them to Participate in the Merits of the State’s Motion to Vacate a Faulty Conviction in Syed v. Lee

Mark Reichart

“[I]n American jurisprudence at least, a private citizen lacks a judicially cognizable interest in the prosecution or nonprosecution of another.”

In Syed v. Lee, the Supreme Court of Maryland set out to establish the scope of a victim’s right to participate in the State’s motion to vacate a conviction in which it no longer placed confidence. At the threshold, the court correctly tempered the authority of the State to dismiss a case with the effect of unilaterally mooting an appeal granted to victims by statute. On the merits, the court decided victims had the right to participate in a hearing on the State’s motion to vacate a conviction by commenting on the merits of the motion. To do so, it tunneled its vision to find support unfounded in canons of statutory construction and ignored the overwhelming evidence showing the General Assembly did not intend to implement such a right. This had the result of handing victims a monumental expansion of their rights and narrowing the longstanding line between the rights and party status of defendants and victims. In a final act of over-inflating victims’ status, the court declined to impose on victims the requirement of overcoming harmless error analysis, which requires a party show the error created actual prejudice. It held that the loss of the right to participate in the vacatur hearing alone created that prejudice, an enormous benefit defendants are largely unfamiliar with. All told, the court misread authority and violated a staple of criminal prosecutions in the United States: The power to prosecute—or not prosecute—belongs to the prosecutor alone.