Gopal Balachandran was in a Zoom meeting with Penn State Dickinson Law colleagues last September when the notification popped up on his screen. It was an email he’d been waiting months for, informing him that he had been granted a post-conviction evidentiary hearing by the Centre County Court of Common Pleas. The hearing would give Balachandran, an associate clinical professor of law, the chance to present exculpatory evidence—evidence that would, if admitted, give Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam a new trial. Vedam was a 21-year-old State College resident when he was convicted in 1983 for the murder of his friend, 19-year-old Thomas Kinser. As of this writing, he is serving a life sentence without parole for a crime he has always said he did not commit. 

Quickly scanning the email, Balachandran noted that the presiding judge, Jonathan Grine ’96 Lib, ’00 JD Dickinson would not hear all of his arguments. But it didn’t matter. Getting a post-conviction hearing is extremely difficult, Balachandran says, particularly for a case that dates back more than 40 years. With it, Balachandran—who directs Penn State Dickinson Law’s Criminal Appellate and Post-Conviction Services Clinic, and has been representing Vedam since 2022—would be able to put forth his most important argument in Vedam’s defense: an FBI ballistics report filed in the early 1980s that was never brought into his 1983 trial. Nor was it brought into Vedam’s second trial in 1988, granted after an appeal. 

Balachandran learned that the report, unavailable to the defense during the trial, contained precise measurements of the bullet hole in Thomas Kinser’s skull. For him, the legal basis for an evidentiary hearing was clear from the start; the Herculean task of going through 40 years of case documentation and culling what was relevant to the brief fell to students in his 2023-2024 postconviction clinic (see sidebar). Emma Ballentine ’24 JD Law, Emaline Maxfield ’24 JD Law, and Nicholas Sondermann ’24 JD Law meticulously combed through all the records, which included 3,000 pages of trial transcripts and documents that Balachandran had spent hours scanning and digitizing. 

The bullet-hole measurements are at the center of Vedam’s case. He was convicted based on the argument that he had bought and tested a .25-caliber pistol a few weeks before Kinser disappeared­—that weapon was never found—and the fact that a .25-caliber bullet was found among Kinser’s remains. But Balachandran believes that a note that he found, and the full FBI report he later gained access to, undermined that argument: both show that during the original murder investigation, the FBI had taken precise measurements of the wound in Kinser’s skull. That report stated that the hole was too small to have been made by a .25-caliber bullet.

In fact, a pathologist had testified to this during Vedam’s 1988 trial. But the prosecution rebuffed that argument, contending that the examiner’s measurements were not specific enough, that they had been taken with rudimentary instruments and therefore were not credible. The pathologist’s testimony was dismissed. 

Since Balachandran took over the case, people across the Centre Region have come to learn about Vedam and his life in the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon, about 35 miles south of State College, where he is serving his life sentence: from Penn State journalism professor Russell Frank, who has written about the case at StateCollege.com, and through the advocacy work of organizations such as the Centre County chapter of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Across State College, many yards display a yellow #FairTrialForSubu sign.

Balachandran says that today, “even for someone who is factually guilty in a case like this, a 21-year-old would not get life without parole—that’s just not a sentence that would happen.” Such sentences remain legal in Pennsylvania, but even here, Balachandran says, the sentence Vedam received in 1983 would be unlikely today.

Only Vedam knows what transpired all those years ago. One day in December 1980, he and Kinser traveled together to Lewistown, Pa., in Kinser’s parents’ van. Vedam returned to State College, as did the Kinser family van, but Thomas Kinser had disappeared. Nine months later, his remains were found in what is now Rothrock State Forest, just outside of State College. 

Early on two frigid mornings last February, Vedam’s family—his sister, Saraswathi, dressed in a traditional South Indian silk saree, along with her husband, their four daughters, a son-in-law, and their 6-month-old granddaughter—and a crowd of supporters carefully walked Bellefonte’s icy sidewalks to the county courthouse for the postconviction evidentiary hearing. For two days they listened to arguments put forth by Balachandran and assistant district attorney Joshua Andrews, and to the testimony of forensics experts representing both the defense and the prosecution. Both sides dissected the technicalities of bullet entry and exit angles, lead transfer, velocity, casings, skull fragmentation, and more. They pored over old handwritten documents and grainy photos and challenged each other on measurement techniques, citing academic studies and research to bolster their arguments. 

Throughout the proceedings, 63-year-old Subu Vedam—dressed in a gray suit belonging to one of his cousins—sat quietly next to Michael Wiseman, a partner in the Philadelphia law firm of Wiseman, Schwartz, Cioschi & Trama and an expert on postconviction appeals, who is working with Balachandran on the case. Many had never seen Vedam in person; some of his family members had never seen him outside of prison. 

After the hearing, supporters gathered at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in State College to share a meal. It had been a good two days, Balachandran told the gathering later that night, but it would take time—several months, in fact—for the judge to make a decision. That the hearing had been granted was important; in his view, it indicated the judge’s openness to considering the evidence he presented, and willingness to consider the alleged improprieties committed at the time of Vedam’s original trial. Should the judge grant relief, Balachandran said, Vedam would be granted a new trial—but the prosecution would be unlikely to seek one.

“There is a very strong line of cases under Pennsylvania state and constitutional law that says if the prosecution misbehaved in the way that [it is alleged] they did in this case, a new trial is barred by double jeopardy,” Wiseman said in an interview following the hearings. 

If so, Vedam would walk free. He would be, Balachandran says, Pennsylvania’s longest-serving exoneree.

Subu and Saraswathi Vedam’s father, Kuppuswamy Vedam, could have accepted offers from any of the U.S. universities that wanted to hire him. But he chose to come back to Penn State, where he’d worked as a postdoctoral scholar in crystallography from 1956 to 1959, and where he and his wife, Nalini, had been happy. 

Kuppuswamy, a physicist, would never regret his decision to join the newly launched Materials Research Laboratory set up in 1962 by Rustum Roy ’48 PhD EMS. Saraswathi says her father was proud of the work he did at Penn State, was grateful for the many opportunities, and for his colleagues and the many friends he made —people who stuck by Vedam and his family after Subu’s arrest and conviction and have continued to support them. But until his death in 2009, Kuppuswamy wondered if things might have turned out differently if he’d never brought his family to the U.S. “He was heartbroken about the position his son was in—but he was also heartbroken at an existential level,” says Saraswathi. “He trusted the system, he believed in the fundamental goodness of people, in truth, in the veracity of science. This situation flew in the face of all that, and he would never forgive himself for it.”

To her knowledge, Saraswathi was the first Indian baby ever born in Centre County. In 1962, when the family arrived in State College and Saraswathi entered kindergarten, her brother, Subu, was a toddler. “I remember him waiting for me to get home from school, his nose pressed up against the windowpane,” she says. “I remember teaching him to ride a bike. He was my only brother. We were close.”

At that time, there were very few Indian families in State College, and the Vedams became de facto elder siblings and local parents to many who arrived over the years. Nalini Vedam looked after everyone’s babies and taught women how to cook at a time when it was almost impossible locally to find the spices and ingredients required for Indian food. The Indian cooking classes she later held in her kitchen became popular with many State College residents, including Gilbert Morrison ’77 A&A and his wife, Kim Morrison ’76 A&A. “Gil sent me to Mrs. Vedam’s cooking class as a gift,” says Kim, a nationally recognized baker, now retired. “Eventually, I brought Gil with me, and that’s how we got to know the Vedams.”

Saraswathi recalls a happy childhood and adolescence in State College. But things were harder for her brother, she says, particularly as he entered his teenage years. He wasn’t into sports, he was bored in school, and he fell in with the counterculture crowd. Like many young people at the time, he grew his hair long, and he experimented with marijuana and LSD—buying, selling, using.

It was in the summer of 1981, Saraswathi says, that Vedam began to clean up his act. Brother and sister planned a surprise 25th wedding anniversary celebration for their parents in the garden of friends Mukanda Das, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, and his wife, Rama. “Everything was going well for Subu,” Saraswathi says. “He’d enrolled in Penn State, he was working in a lab as a research assistant. And he was bored with his old group of friends.” He chopped off his long, curly hair and shaved off his thick beard, mailing the locks to his parents in Germany, where they were spending a sabbatical year.

Vedam was arrested in March 1982 on 19 charges (later dropped) ranging from drug possession to receiving stolen property. His parents were still abroad, and Saraswathi was in midwifery school at Yale. Getting the call from her brother informing her that he’d been arrested was overwhelming for Saraswathi, especially with her parents overseas. “I was a kid myself,” she says. She and her boyfriend, Jeff, now her husband, drove to State College for her brother’s preliminary hearing. Then, she says, “we called my parents.”

In late June 1982, Vedam was charged with first-degree murder. He was incarcerated without bail for a year until his first trial in 1983.
Saraswathi, now a professor of midwifery at the University of British Columbia’s Birth Place Lab, has never stopped fighting for her brother. Over the years, she’s tried everything—not least repeatedly asking the Centre County DA’s office for access to Vedam’s case records. She’s contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, tried to get Vedam’s case featured on 60 Minutes, and approached the Pennsylvania chapter of the Innocence Project. Her four daughters have been visiting Vedam in prison since they were babies.  

While incarcerated, Vedam has earned three degrees. He has helped hundreds of inmates earn their GEDs, and he is a founding member of the first Pennsylvania inmate-initiated Prison Literacy Council, one of the first of its kind in the country. Saraswathi says her brother’s life behind bars has been about serving others. 

In 2016, when Vedam’s case finally came to the top of its pile, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project sent his dossier to the pro bono law firm of Barley Snyder in Lancaster, Pa., which is still a part of his defense. And then in 2022, the Innocence Project called Saraswathi to inform her that another lawyer would be joining the case. Balachandran, a former public defender, was Indian; for the family, this was meaningful. He would be the first person to get the Centre County DA’s office to open up Vedam’s case files, thereby giving his family the greatest hope they’d had in years.

For Balachandran, it was partly about the shared heritage, about the tiny black seeds of the mustard plant that are tempered in searingly hot oil to release the unique flavor that enhances the classic dishes of South India that he—and Subu Vedam—grew up on. 

Born in Kolkata, India, Balachandran came to the U.S. in 1979, when he was 3 years old. His family lived in upstate New York and Minnesota—in places where, he says, “you’d have to drive hundreds of miles to get mustard seeds”—before finally settling in North Carolina in 1984. “Our world was close enough to the Vedams’ world,” he says. “In elementary school, my brother was 50% of the minority population; I was the other 50%.”

He received an undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which gave him an understanding of and interest in forensic science. While studying for a master’s degree in South Asian languages and literature at the University of Chicago, Balachandran read an article about law students suing pharmaceutical companies to make AIDS drugs more affordable. “I thought, ‘Wow, if law students can do something that cool, I wonder what lawyers can do,’” he says. He went on to earn his JD with honors from The George Washington University Law School, joining a corporate law firm in Boston, and then becoming a public defender.

Balachandran says he’d heard about the Vedam case long before he came to State College. In the South Indian social circles his parents frequented, Vedam’s name had come up more than once—as a chilling, cautionary tale, perhaps, of what could happen to young men, even those from highly educated, professional families. But the story also created empathy, Balachandran says, fostering a sense of community even for those who didn’t know the Vedam family personally. So when Balachandran moved to State College in 2017 after his wife, Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, accepted a position in Penn State’s history department, he was excited to learn more about the case. He read journalism professor Frank’s columns and carefully studied the transcripts of Vedam’s trials. 

He was struck, he says, by what he saw as the “oversimplification” of things, the fact that the case relied on circumstantial evidence to arrive at the conclusion that a young man of color who had been involved in drugs and charged with nonviolent crimes had committed murder. It wasn’t just that Vedam claimed he was innocent: There was no witness to Kinser’s murder, no motive, no weapon—not even a date of death, Balachandran says, and no direct evidence. Kinser’s decomposing body was found months after his death, in a remote area littered with bullet casings.

Intrigued, Balachandran contacted the Pennsylvania Innocence Project to offer his assistance with the case. He then petitioned the Centre County DA’s office for access to Vedam’s case files. This time, district attorney Bernie Cantorna obliged. “That was a complete godsend for Subu and his family, and Bernie Cantorna deserves credit,” Balachandran says. Without access to those files, he would never have found the handwritten note about the FBI’s ballistics report. He also credits the DA for contacting the FBI and asking the Bureau to turn over the full report. 

Since then, Balachandran has been working closely with lawyers from Barley Snyder and with Wiseman, who says he was attracted to Vedam’s case after hearing about it from a public defender friend of his son’s in Washington, D.C.

“It seemed like a magnificent injustice,” Wiseman says. “Sometimes, when the government withholds exculpatory information, it doesn’t matter because it’s not going to make any difference to the case. Evidence that’s withheld has to be material to conviction, and in this case, the fact that they withheld the measurements is an outrage.”

Vedam’s postconviction case rests on two legal principles: A Brady violation, based on the government’s withholding of exculpatory evidence material to the conviction that, had it been presented during his trials, might have resulted in a different outcome; and a Napue violation, which occurs when a prosecutor does not correct false or misleading witness testimony, even if the prosecutor knows it is false. Vedam’s Napue claim, Balachandran says, is intertwined with his Brady claim involving the FBI note and report, which were never disclosed. “At the 1988 trial, the prosecutor asked the FBI expert if he found anything inconsistent between his measurement of the hole in Kinser’s skull and a .25 caliber bullet,” says Balachandran. “The expert said, ‘In my opinion, no.’” 

But Ray Gricar, then Centre County DA, knew the exact measurements, says Balachandran, even though they were never disclosed. “He knew that his own pathologist had already testified that a bigger bullet cannot cause a smaller hole—and yet he asked for an opinion that he knew was contradicted by the exact measurements.”

It fell to the students in Balachandran’s clinic to comb through the minutiae of the case files and pick out the holes. “Each of us picked a third of the document and read through it carefully,” says Emma Ballentine, one of the law students. “We really focused on the main argument, which was the size of the hole in Kinser’s skull versus the size of the bullet. We were able to look at slides of the hole. Being able to sit down and dig through everything was really an amazing experience.”

As was working with Balachandran.

“He’s like an encyclopedia when it comes to the laws on this case,” says Nicholas Sondermann, another of Balachandran’s law students. “He’s also really interested in getting the students involved— it was genuinely a conversation between the four of us.”

“As a criminal defense practitioner, you see a lot of lawyers who just aren’t prepared, who just go through the motions,” says Wiseman. “Gopal and his students were 180 degrees the opposite of that. They were methodical, they were extraordinarily diligent. And Gopal knew the science as well as the scientists. That comes from the massive amount of preparation he did and his deep study of the issues.”

Under his guidance, Balachandran’s students learned how to work in a team with other attorneys, how to talk to witnesses and prepare them for trial. They gained a thorough understanding of criminal defense. Most importantly, says Sondermann, who now works at the Lancaster, Pa., public defender’s office, they learned that even if a piece of evidence might seem inconsequential at first, it shouldn’t be disregarded. “In a case this old that’s been fraught with all kinds of appeals, you have to just go through everything,” says Sondermann. “It was a learning experience in a lot of ways, and I would love nothing more than to take a case to trial.”

Until she signed up for Balachandran’s clinic, Ballentine had been more inclined toward a career in criminal prosecution. She says working on the Vedam case and studying potential failings by the prosecution helped her realize the importance of governmental ethics: “[It] informed me that you need to be really careful,” says Ballentine, for whom the experience, and the chance to meet Vedam in prison, inspired a reconsideration of her career path. “No matter what side you’re on, everyone deserves a fair trial.”

After her brother was tried for the second time and again sentenced to life without parole, Saraswathi Vedam’s parents asked her to move back to State College. To be close to them, to her brother. She could not. 

Saraswathi will always have a fondness for those in the community who stood by her family. But she cannot forget what it felt like when her brother was arrested and convicted. She still remembers the barrage of negative press, what she saw as the “othering” of Vedam by local media and by the prosecution, particularly during his second trial in 1988, when prosecutors kept him on the stand for three hours and questioned him about his Indian heritage, his daily practices of yoga and meditation. She wore a saree to the evidentiary hearing in February because, she says, she and her mother had been told not to wear their traditional attire to Vedam’s first two trials.

Justice, Saraswathi believes, is not only long overdue for her family, but for the Kinsers, too. “We haven’t been able to have Subu with us, but we have still been able to know him,” she says. “Tom Kinser’s parents died without knowing him as an adult.”

In late June, Centre County prosecutors submitted their final argument against a retrial, contending that Vedam’s conviction should stand. Assistant district attorneys Josh Andrews and Matt Metzger ’11 Lib were critical of the conclusions reached by Balachandran’s forensics expert and cited research showing “no statistical difference” between wounds caused by .22- and .25-caliber bullets. As this issue went to press in early August, the case was in the hands of Judge Grine, who had given no indication of when he might rule.

Should the decision go against Vedam, his family’s fight will continue. His defense team has already filed a motion in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania and will appeal there. The state supreme court would be next. “I think we won the debate,” Balachandran says. “If there’s just the existence of a debate, which there is, I believe we win.”

It’s a sentiment Wiseman shares.

“All you can ever hope for is to tell a person’s story and try your best to get them the relief they deserve,” he says. “Whatever the outcome may be, Penn State and this community should be very proud of what was done here.”