An Indian-origin Pennsylvanian man, Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam, walked out of jail after 43 years only to be arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who were waiting for him to be free so that they could act on a decades-old deportation order. A major protest has begun, led by his family, demanding the release of the 64-year-old man who spent his entire adult life behind bars for a murder he did not commit.
Arrested in 1982 for the murder of a friend
Subu Vedam was arrested in 1982 on charges of the murder of his friend, 19-year-old Thomas Kisner. He was convicted in 1983 and was sentenced to life without parole. Subu maintained his innocence but all his appeals were denied as he continued to languish in jail. In 2022, new pieces of evidence were found that the bullet wound in Kinser’s skull was too small for the gun that they had earlier thought was the murder weapon. Vedam became the longest-serving exoneree in Pennsylvania history, and one of the longest-serving in the United States.
ICE comes with a deportation order dating back to the 1980s
Subu was born in India and arrived in the United States when he was 9 months old. The ICE said there was a legacy deportation order against him in the 1980s even before he was “wrongfully” convicted of the murder. It was because of a drug conviction that he was involved in his youth. When he was 19, he had pleaded guilty to intent to distribute LSD. He was never deported as he was serving a life sentence.
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He doesn’t know anyone in India: Family
A spokesperson for the family, Mike Truppa, told the Miami Herald that the move of the ICE completely blindsided his family because he did not know India. “There’s some ancestry in India where he might have some nominal relations, but his entire family — all of his family relationships — are here and in Canada.”“I’m not sure we have expectations. We definitely have hope,” Vedam’s niece Zoë Miller Vedam said to the Miami Herald. “It’s been a very long journey toward exonerating my uncle. He spent the last 44 years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, and we’ve been fighting and supporting him this whole time.”“India, in many ways, is a completely different world to him,” she said. “He left India when he was nine months old. None of us can remember our lives at nine months old. He hasn’t been there for over 44 years, and the people he knew when he went as a child have passed away. His whole family — his sister, his nieces, his grand-nieces — we’re all US citizens, and we all live here.”
