Two separate courts in the United States have ordered immigration officials not to deport a man of Indian origin, who was found innocent in a murder case on October 2 after spending 43 years in jail in Pennsylvania, AP reported on Tuesday.

Subramanyam Vedam, 64, was released from state prison on October 3 after the District Attorney Cantorna announced that it was dropping charges against him and would not pursue a new trial.

However, as he walked out of jail, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Vedam into custody, citing his drug conviction at the age of 19. The order was dormant while he was serving a life sentence.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking to deport Vedam over the decades-old no-contest plea to charges of delivering a hallucinogenic drug, filed when he was about 20. His lawyers have argued that the four decades he wrongly spent in prison, during which he earned degrees and tutored fellow inmates, should outweigh the old drug case, AP reported.

Vedam is detained at a short-term immigration holding facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, which also serves as a deportation hub.

An immigration judge stayed his deportation last week until the Board of Immigration Appeals decides whether to review his case, reported AP. The entire process can take several months.

His lawyers also obtained a separate stay from a federal court in Pennsylvania, the news agency reported.

Vedam had arrived in the US from India with his parents in 1962 when he was nine months old. He was arrested in 1982 for the murder of his friend, 19-year-old Thomas Kinser.

Kinser was reported missing in December 1980 and his remains were found in September 1981, with a bullet wound in his skull.

Prosecutors had alleged that Vedam shot Kinser with a .25-caliber pistol. The weapon was never recovered. Vedam was convicted twice, in 1983 and 1988, and sentenced to life without parole.

However, in 2022, lawyers associated with the non-profit organisation Pennsylvania Innocence Project found documents, including a report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which showed that the bullet wound in Kinser’s skull was too small to have been caused by a .25-caliber bullet.

Based on this, in August, the Centre County Court of Common Pleas vacated Vedam’s conviction, stating that “had that evidence been available at the time, there would have been a reasonable probability that the jury’s judgement would have been affected”.

On October 2, the District Attorney Cantorna announced that it was dropping charges against Vedam and would not pursue a new trial.

On Monday, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that the reversal in the murder case does not negate the drug conviction.

“Having a single conviction vacated will not stop ICE’s enforcement of the federal immigration law,” AP quoted Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for Public Affairs, as saying.

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