ICE Moves to Deport Wrongfully Imprisoned Indian-Origin Man Subu Vedam

Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam, a 64-year-old permanent resident of Indian origin who spent nearly his entire adult life behind bars for a wrongful murder conviction, was released from Pennsylvania’s Huntingdon State Correctional Institution on October 3 only to be immediately detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The agency is acting on a decades-old deportation order, thrusting Vedam into a new legal battle despite his recent exoneration. Born in India and brought to the United States at nine months old, Vedam has no meaningful ties to his birthplace and considers Pennsylvania home, where his family resides.

Vedam’s ordeal began in December 1980, when his friend and former roommate, 19-year-old Thomas Kinser, disappeared after borrowing his parents’ van to drive Vedam to Lewistown for a drug purchase. Kinser’s remains were discovered nine months later in a rural sinkhole in Centre County, with a gunshot wound to the head. No murder weapon was ever found, but prosecutors built a circumstantial case against the then-20-year-old Vedam, alleging he shot Kinser over a stolen synthetic ruby from Penn State University and prior drug-related tensions. Arrested in March 1982 on unrelated charges, Vedam was swiftly indicted for first-degree murder. He endured two trials—in 1983 and a retrial after the first conviction was overturned on procedural grounds—resulting in a life sentence without parole each time. Key evidence included a .25-calibre shell casing near the body and testimony that Vedam purchased such a gun, though discrepancies in witness accounts and ballistics were overlooked.

The case languished for decades until 2022, when attorneys from the Pennsylvania Innocence Project uncovered suppressed evidence in the Centre County District Attorney’s files: an FBI ballistics report indicating the skull wound was too small for a .25-calibre bullet, along with notes revealing prosecutorial misconduct in coaching witnesses and ignoring alternative suspects. In February 2025, a forensic expert testified during an evidentiary hearing that the mismatch “severed the link” between Vedam and the crime. On August 28, 2025, Centre County Judge Jonathan D. Grine vacated the conviction, citing due process violations. District Attorney Bernie Cantorna dismissed all charges on October 2, deeming a retrial impossible due to lost witnesses and the passage of time, making Vedam Pennsylvania’s longest-serving exoneree.

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During his imprisonment, Vedam transformed Huntingdon into a hub of rehabilitation, designing literacy programmes, tutoring hundreds of inmates, fundraising for Big Brothers Big Sisters, and earning three college degrees, including an MBA with a 4.0 GPA—the first graduate degree by a Pennsylvania inmate in over 150 years. Yet freedom proved fleeting. ICE invoked a 1988 deportation order stemming from Vedam’s teenage guilty plea to intent to distribute LSD and theft, offences committed at age 19 that rendered him deportable as a non-citizen. The agency, describing him as a “career criminal”, argues the order can now proceed unimpeded by state custody. Vedam is held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, pending removal proceedings.

Vedam’s family, led by sister Saraswathi Vedam and niece Zoë Miller Vedam, has filed motions to reopen the immigration case, urging consideration of his exoneration, rehabilitation, and lifelong U.S. residency. “Deporting him to India—a country he left as an infant—would compound this injustice,” said immigration attorney Ava Benach. A public campaign via FreeSubu.org demands intervention, highlighting how the wrongful conviction stalled resolution of his status decades ago. As protests mount, the case spotlights tensions in U.S. immigration policy for long-term residents entangled in the justice system, with advocates calling for discretionary relief to prevent what they term a “second exile.

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