His murder conviction was overturned after 40 years. His next fight is to stay in the US

By Omar Jimenez, CNN

(CNN) — It was three in the morning when Saraswathi Vedam was awoken by the call she’d been waiting over 40 years for: Her brother’s murder conviction was being overturned.

She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.

Saraswathi was across the world giving lectures as a professor in New Zealand when she heard the news. But over a month later, when it came time to pick her brother up from the Pennsylvania prison where he was being held, his older sister received another shocking piece of news.

“He was gone,” she said.

Subramanyam Vedam had been taken into ICE custody.

On Wednesday, an immigration judge could decide whether the 64-year-old, known as “Subu,” will be deported to a country he hasn’t been to since he was an infant, or whether he will be allowed to stay in the United States after another judge ruled he hadn’t been given a fair murder trial.

Saraswathi is expected to testify at the hearing, before waiting with cautious optimism to learn her brother’s fate, just as she has for the past 44 years.

An overturned conviction

Over 40 years ago, Subu was sentenced to life in prison without parole for a murder he maintains he never committed. He also pleaded no contest to charges of possessing LSD with the intent to distribute it.

In August 2025, a judge vacated his murder conviction after a team of attorneys revealed prosecutors had withheld potentially critical ballistics evidence during his two trials.

The possibility of freedom, decades in the making, suddenly became a reality.

But that quickly faded.

A day after his charges were dropped, he was taken into ICE custody on a deportation order that never went away from the drug-related conviction.

“It wasn’t out of the question that something like that would happen,” Saraswathi, his sister, said, but so much time had passed, “I didn’t even remember that was still something.”

Their parents brought Subu to the United States from India when he was an infant, she said.

“They came as a young couple with two young kids, with a lot of hope and a good job,” his sister, who was born in the US, recalled.

Their parents visited him in prison weekly when they were still alive, she said. And they were the first people Saraswathi thought of when she got the late-night phone call that his conviction was being vacated.

“It wasn’t fair that they didn’t live to see this moment and that he had lost so many decades of his life,” she told CNN through tears.

After coming to the US as an infant, plus decades behind bars, Subu has no family ties to India, his sister said.

“It just doesn’t make sense to me that he would be at risk of being separated from the only country he’s ever known and the only family he has,” she told CNN.

The Department of Homeland Security has continued its push for his deportation.

“Having a single conviction vacated will not stop ICE’s enforcement of the federal immigration law,” a DHS spokesperson previously told CNN on this case. “If you break the law, you will face the consequences,” the statement continued.

In February 2026, the US Board of Immigration Appeals – the highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration laws – determined Subu’s case is an “exceptional” situation that warrants re-opening his immigration case.

The original deportation order, which was thrown out by the board, was based on Subu’s now-vacated murder conviction and related drug charge, according to his attorney, Ava Benach.

But later in February, a federal immigration judge denied Subu’s request for bond as the proceedings play out. The judge weighed his conviction of selling LSD, which is typically considered an “aggravated felony,” in her decision.

Benach was with Subu for hours on the Friday leading up to Wednesday’s hearing.

“He’s someone who understands patience more than anything,” Benach told CNN.

“I think he sees the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.

It’s an optimism that hinges partly on his positivity throughout his years in prison, but one that does not always hold up in court.

Withheld evidence

Subu’s murder conviction centered on the killing of his friend and former roommate, 19-year-old college student Thomas Kinser.

On the day of Kinser’s disappearance in December 1980, Subu asked him for a ride to a nearby town to buy drugs, according to The Associated Press.

Nine months later, Kinser’s remains were found in a sinkhole with a bullet hole in his skull, according to court documents. Though no weapon was found, a .25-caliber bullet was found inside Kinser’s shirt.

Subu was initially detained on drug charges while police investigated and was eventually charged with Kinser’s murder. He pleaded no contest to the drug charges, court documents show.

While a jury heard testimony that Subu bought a .25-caliber gun during his trial, they were never shown an FBI report that suggested Kinser’s bullet wound was too small to have been inflicted by that gun. Despite prosecutors knowing the specific measurements of the wound, they excluded them from the report given to Subu’s defense attorneys, court records show.

That FBI report was among the crucial discoveries made by a team of attorneys in 2022, which eventually led to a judge ruling in late August 2025 that he had not been given a fair trial, entitling him to a new one.

A little over a month later, the Centre County District Attorney’s Office announced it would not seek a new trial and would drop the charges against Subu.

The district attorney maintained in a statement that “Mr. Kinser was killed by a .25 caliber pistol. That evidence was good 40 years ago and it’s good today.”

“Nevertheless, the facts remain that trying a case 44 years later will be extremely difficult and the probabilities of success are not what they would have been,” Bernie Cantorna’s statement continued. “He has had 44 years of confinement with no recorded issues, that lead one to conclude that he does not pose a threat to the public going forward.”

The final part of Cantorna’s statement could be crucial as a judge considers whether Subu can remain in the United States.

“It’s hard to keep getting your hopes up and having them dashed,” his sister, Saraswathi, told CNN.

“We’re hopeful and still imagining what it would be like to have him home,” she said.

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CNN’s Elizabeth Wolfe and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.