US: Two U.S. courts have temporarily halted the deportation of Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam, a 64-year old Indian origin man who spent nearly four decades behind bars before his murder conviction was overturned.
Vedam, who legally immigrated to the U.S. from India as a baby, is currently being held at a detention centre in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Last week, an immigration judge granted a stay on his deportation until the Board of Immigration Appeals decides whether to reopen his case a process that could take several months. On the same day, a district court in Pennsylvania also issued an order blocking his removal.
Who Is Subramanyam Vedam?
Vedam, who moved to the U.S. from India when he was just nine months old, was arrested in 1982 for allegedly murdering his friend, 19-year-old Thomas Kinser, who went missing in December 1980. Kinser’s body was discovered nine months later in a wooded area, and Vedam, the last person seen with him became the prime suspect. Around that time, Vedam, a lawful permanent U.S. resident, was also briefly detained on drug related charges.
In 1983, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, along with an additional two and a half to five years for a separate drug offence. His defence team long argued that the conviction rested solely on circumstantial evidence, with no witnesses, clear motive, or physical proof linking him to the crime.
Despite his incarceration, Vedam spent his years in a Pennsylvania prison turning his life around earning three academic degrees, teaching fellow inmates, and becoming a mentor. Over the decades, his family fought relentlessly to prove his innocence, though his father passed away in 2009 and his mother in 2016 before seeing justice served.
In August this year, Vedam finally got a second chance at freedom after a Pennsylvania court overturned his conviction, following the discovery of long suppressed ballistic evidence that had been withheld by prosecutors for decades.
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Why He Was Taken Into Custody Again
Vedam walked free from prison on October 3 after spending more than 43 years behind bars only to be immediately detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The agency now seeks to deport him, citing a decades-old minor drug conviction. The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the overturning of his murder case does not nullify his separate drug-related sentence.
However, Vedam’s sister and legal team insist that his wrongful incarceration for over four decades should far outweigh the drug offence, calling his continued detention deeply unjust.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: ZEE News
