The case against Subramanyam Vedam was always flimsy. Now it may have disintegrated altogether.
Vedam has been locked up for 40 years, having been arrested and then convicted of murdering his roommate, Thomas Kinser. Both men grew up in State College and were the sons of Penn State professors. Both were 19 years old in 1980, the year Kinser was killed.
There were no witnesses to Kinser’s death. Vedam has always denied having anything to do with it.
Prosecutors contended that Vedam bought a .25-caliber pistol from a man named Dan O’Connell before Kinser’s death, and that .25-caliber bullet casings were found near Kinser’s body.
A couple of years ago, a team of Penn State law students, led by Professor (and State College Borough Councilmember) Gopal Balachandran, got the Centre County District Attorney’s office to open Vedam’s case file. There, they say, they found evidence that had not been presented at trial:
A diagram of the crime scene indicated that some of the casings found near Kinser’s body were from a .22. And measurement of the hole in Kinser’s skull found that it was too small to have been made by a .25-caliber bullet.
Ergo, they claim, the prosecution’s main theory of the case – that Vedam killed Kinser with a .25-caliber gun – has collapsed.
Then there’s the question of Dan O’Connell’s credibility. At Vedam’s retrial in 1988, the prosecution’s star witness lied when he said he had not been convicted of any crimes in the previous seven years. Vedam’s legal team says the case file shows that prosecutors knew and did not disclose that O’Connell was convicted of multiple crimes during that time period.
Had those convictions been disclosed, Vedam’s team argues, the jury might not have put much stock in O’Connell’s claim that he sold the murder weapon to Vedam before Kinser’s death. (Vedam has said he bought the gun from O’Connell after Kinser’s death.)
These two pieces of “suppressed” evidence form the basis of a petition for post-conviction relief that could result in a judge ordering a new trial. More than 150 community members have sent letters to Vedam’s legal team in support of the petition.
A hearing has been scheduled for May 6-8 in Centre County Court of Common Pleas, but the Centre County District Attorney’s office has just moved to dismiss the petition – calling its claims “meritless” — so now it’s up to Judge Jonathan Grine to decide whether the hearing will take place as scheduled.
Subu Vedam is 62 years old. By all accounts he was something of a wild child when he was in his teens. He dealt drugs. So did lots of other people in State College in those years.
I’ve talked to several of Vedam’s high school classmates. None of them thought he was capable of murder. When I visited him in the state prison in Huntingdon, I found it hard to believe as well.
But I tried not to be influenced by the fact that he came from a respected family, or that he has probably read more books than most Penn State faculty members during his four decades behind bars. My feeling was that only Subu – and if it wasn’t Subu, the real killer – knows if he killed Tom Kinser.
I thought that, guilty or not, life without possibility of parole was and is a ridiculous sentence, except, perhaps for serial killers. It makes a mockery of the idea of “correction,” as in Department of Corrections. It makes a mockery of the idea of rehabilitation.
Life without parole essentially declares Subu Vedam to be irredeemable, even if he was young and stupid and involved with drugs when he committed the crime; even if, by all accounts, he has been a model prisoner during the two-thirds of his life he has spent in Huntingdon; even if statistics show that the chances of older ex-cons committing violent crimes are practically nil.
But my entire line of reasoning began with the premise, “even if Subu did it.” Now, though, it’s looking more and more like there may be enough reasonable doubt that he did it to warrant an acquittal if Judge Grine orders a new trial.
“Subu Vedam is an innocent man, wrongfully convicted and serving a life sentence for a crime he did not commit,” Balachandran and his students declare in a statement they prepared for the news media. “From our review, it’s clear that there are serious doubts as to the integrity of Subu’s conviction. The files reveal a systematic denial of Subu’s constitutional rights to Due Process and substantially weaken the case against him as the perpetrator of this crime. Among other things, our review of these files indicates that important evidence was neither turned over to the defense, nor presented to the jury at trial. We look forward to presenting our evidence to the Commonwealth and to the Court.”
At the conclusion of the May hearing, if it takes place, Subu Vedam, born in India and convicted by an all-white jury on flimsy and possibly fraudulent evidence, should be given a chance to get his life back.
