A Jamaican national who told Law360 he feared the end of his three-decade stint in a New York prison would lead to being deported to Jamaica, where he would likely be killed, is seeking asylum after being taken into immigration enforcement custody last week.

Eric Tolliver, who was born in Jamaica as Gerald Anthony King, was set to be released on parole last month after serving 33 years in prison for the murder of Marshall Solomon in Syracuse, New York, a crime he is adamant he did not commit. But instead, he and his lawyer said he was moved immediately into the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Oct. 27. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed his arrest in a news release Oct. 29.

In December, Tolliver told Law360 that if he were to be sent back to Jamaica, he would be "hunted" and likely killed because of his late father's status in the Jamaica Labor Party or JLP, one of two dominant political parties in the country whose conflict has often erupted into violence. Since Tolliver has been in prison, three of his brothers and his father have been shot and killed in Jamaica.

"It's our position that the Jamaican government, based upon Tony's father's political activities, is complicit and would be directing the harm that would befall him," his attorney Craig Relles said Monday. "The United States does not deport people to where they would be tortured or murdered."

Tolliver, with the help of White Plains-based Relles of Relles Law PLLC, won a stay of removal Oct. 28 in Ulster Immigration Court in Napanoch, N.Y. A judge granted the stay so there is time to consider Tolliver's motion to reopen his immigration case.

Tolliver was initially denied asylum in 2002, but since then, his father and two of his brothers have been killed and Tolliver said he continues to receive threats.

"His family's been annihilated based upon the political activity of his father in Jamaica," Relles told Law360 on Monday.

Tolliver and his siblings said that his father, Fitzgerald King, was "well-feared" as a powerful "don" or enforcer for the JLP in May Pen — a town in the parish of Clarendon. As a result, King's children were targeted by members of JLP's political rival, the People's National Party, or PNP. Tolliver said in his asylum application, reviewed by Law360, that he and his siblings were seen as "part of [King's] political legacy, and therefore as enemies."

"This persecution has been relentless and purely driven by political motives, making it extremely dangerous for me to return to Jamaica," Tolliver wrote. "We have lived our entire lives in fear, moving constantly, unable to attend school or live normally."

According to local news reports and death certificates reviewed by Law360, Tolliver's brother Richard King was "shot dead by gunmen" in the parish of Granville St. James in 2001, his father was killed in his sleep by gunmen five years later, his half-brother Rollin "Superman" Walker was shot and killed while driving in Montego Bay in 2019, and his brother Kevin King was killed in 2022.

JLP's rivalry with PNP, which was responsible for one of Jamaica's most violent periods in the 1980s, persists today. The parties even splintered into two rival gangs that trafficked drugs into the United States — the Spangler Posse, associated with the PNP, and the Shower Posse, connected to the JLP.

This history of political violence should help Tolliver's case, Relles said. Even though Tolliver was convicted of an aggravated felony, he is still eligible for protection under the United Nations' Convention Against Torture, which says that someone cannot be sent to their home country if it's likely they would suffer harm or torture at the hands of a government official.

Tolliver isn't the first man who feared deportation to Jamaica that Relles has represented. In 2019, alongside attorney Gregory Copeland, he helped a man who had been a cooperating witness in the United States' case against Shower Posse leader and notorious drug kingpin Christopher Coke. Similar to Tolliver, the former gang member, identified in court records as Sean B., had already seen several members of his family murdered and said that if he returned to Jamaica he would be killed.

On May 30 of that year, ICE agents put Sean B. on a plane for Kingston before the government received a restraining order signed by U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty in New Jersey blocking the deportation. In the three days he spent in Jamaica before being sent back to the United States, the man barely escaped assailants waiting for him with a machete and sawed-off shotgun, his lawyers told the New York Daily News at the time.

The threat for Tolliver is very real, Relles said.

"People win those types of cases, and I believe that we can carry the burden in this case," Relles said.

Tolliver is also seeking exoneration for his 1993 conviction with cases under review before the New York Commission on Prosecutorial Misconduct. Tolliver argues that prosecutors in his case withheld evidence that an important witness, Bradley Hunt, might have gotten out of warrants he was facing in exchange for his testimony.

He also presented an affidavit from his co-defendant in the murder case, Clifton Gordon, in which Gordon said the killing wasn't committed by Tolliver — but rather by Gordon and Talbert Simpson, the key witness against Tolliver in his trial.

"There was a lot of evidence that he did not kill this guy," Justin Bonus, the lawyer who helped Tolliver on his 2023 state innocence petition, told Law360 last year. "He had a very compelling case."

The DHS news release published Oct. 29 included Tolliver on its list of "the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens" whom ICE had arrested that week. But his parole application, drafted by members of CUNY School of Law's Defenders Clinic, tells a different story. The application notes that Tolliver "taught himself how to read and write, published books and poems and used his time to uplift those around him."

"In my years of teaching art in colleges and universities, I've found it exceedingly rare to work with a student as deeply present and compassionate as Mr. Tolliver," Eliza Lu Doyle, a teaching artist with Arts in Corrections NYS who taught Tolliver for three years in an arts program at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, wrote in the application.

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.