Gopal Balachandran was hired at Penn State Law in 2018 to teach legal writing to international students. But after learning about his career as a public defender, students requested he start what became the Criminal Appellate and Post-Conviction Services Clinic, as a complementary offering to the existing Indigent Criminal Justice Defense Clinic.
Balachandran hadn’t done postconviction work, he says, and he wasn’t sure how it would develop. He had no idea how important the clinic would become after he took on the case of Subu Vedam. Balachandran and his students began reviewing Vedam’s case in March 2022 and filed paperwork in March 2023 requesting access from the Centre County District Attorney’s Office to more than 40 years’ worth of documentation. Successive cohorts of students have continued working on the case; those in the 2024-2025 cohort prepared witnesses for the hearing, and when Balachandran received the hearing transcripts, they helped him go through those.
Since the clinic took on the case, Balachandran has received scores of requests from other incarcerated individuals. The cases the clinic might be able to help with are those that “students can sink their teeth into,” he says, “go through all the documentation with a fine-tooth comb, pick out what they think is interesting, important, and material, and talk it through.” The clinic has worked on numerous sentence commutations and collaborated with the local chapter of the Pennsylvania Prison Society to successfully commute the sentence of an incarcerated individual with Huntington’s disease. Students have also worked on and helped write various appellate briefs.
The personal interactions students get with clients and witnesses are highlights of their clinic experience, Balachandran says. Students working on Vedam’s case, for instance, visited the prison: “They know what the inside of a state correctional facility looks like,” he says. And earlier this year, two of his students traveled with him to North Carolina to visit the lab of Ann Ross, a forensic scientist who provided expert testimony in Vedam’s case.
