Man wrongly imprisoned for decades finally freed—and immediately nabbed by ICE
A man who spent more than four decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit was finally freed earlier this month—only to get immediately apprehended and detained by federal immigration agents.
As the Miami Herald reported on Sunday, 64-year-old Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam was released from prison on October 3 after having had his murder conviction vacated when a court found that prosecutors had concealed evidence that would have seriously undermined their case against him.
Vedam’s freedom was short-lived, however, as he was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who justified his detention by citing a decades-old deportation order that was based largely on a murder conviction that has since proven to be false.
He is currently being held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an ICE facility in central Pennsylvania, where he is being processed for deportation.
Vedam’s family, which had expected to welcome him home after his release, put out a statement demanding justice and calling on immigration courts to intervene on his behalf.
“This immigration issue is a remnant of Subu’s original case,” the family said. “Since that wrongful conviction has now been officially vacated and all charges against Subu have been dismissed, we have asked the immigration court to reopen the case and consider the fact that Subu has been exonerated. Our family continues to wait—and long for the day we can finally be together with him again.”
Vedam was born in India but was brought by his parents to the US when he was just 9 months old.
In 1982, he was arrested and charged with the murder of a friend, whom prosecutors alleged he shot with a .25-caliber pistol. However, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project three years ago uncovered evidence that prosecutors had covered up a report from the FBI on the case, which suggested “that the bullet wound in Kinser’s skull was too small to have been caused by a .25-caliber bullet,” wrote The Miami Herald.
Before his wrongful arrest for murder, Vedam had pleaded guilty to intent to distribute LSD when he was 19 years old, although his family insists this was a youthful indiscretion rather than evidence of hardcore criminality.
Vedam’s niece, Zoë Miller Vedam, told the Miami Herald that deporting her uncle back to India would be unjust, especially given that he has no memory of that country.
“He left India when he was nine months old,” she emphasized. “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 U.S. citizens, and we all live here.”
A report in the Centre Daily Times published in early October described Vedam as a “model inmate” who “designed and led a prison literacy training program, raised money for Big Brothers Big Sisters, tutored hundreds of inmates and was the first person in the prison’s history to earn a master’s degree.”