• MEMBERS

The Lessons of Vincent Chin: How Quickly We Forget

On June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Chin was brutally murdered when Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz smashed his head open with a baseball bat. The two men, both white, mistook Chin as Japanese and blamed him for the nation's recession (at the time). The subsequent lenient sentence imposed on the two murderers -- 3 years probation and a fine of $3,780 -- spawned disbelief and outrage within the Asian Pacific American community. It is often said that from Chin's horrible death that the Asian Pacific American political identity was born.

Twenty years have passed, and many of us would like to think that our justice system has changed. Hate crime statutes have been enacted. But are racially motivated crimes punished accordingly now? Two cases that took place this year seem to answer this question in the negative.

1. On July 14, 2001, 62-year-old Thung Phetakoune was killed when Richard Labbe slammed his body against the pavement of a parking lot in New Hampshire. The confrontation, unprovoked, was motivated by Labbe's hatred of Vietnamese people and his desire to achieve "payback for the deaths of his relatives in the Vietnam War." Shortly after the incident, Labbe told police, "What's going on is that those Asians killed Americans and you won't do anything about it, so I will." Ironically, Phetakoune was Laotian and had fought alongside Americans during the war. On June 22, 2002, New Hampshire Attorney General Phillip McLaughlin accepted Labbe's guilty plea for a mere charge of Second-Degree Assault. In addition, McLaughlin refused to invoke the New Hampshire hate crime statute.

2. From April to July of 2000, a string of nine rapes on Asian women occurred in the Chicago area. Mark Anthony Lewis was finally caught after raping a 15-year-old Vietnamese girl, one of his last victims. While the girl was home alone home during her summer vacation, Lewis had posed as a construction worker and asked to use her bathroom. Once inside, he handcuffed, raped, and sodomized her for three hours while holding her at gunpoint. On May 2, 2002, a jury returned a guilty verdict for one count of home invasion and eight counts of criminal sexual assault. Like the New Hampshire case, however, the prosecutors here did not lodge hate crime charges. Further, although Lewis was originally indicted for 212 counts of rape, Assistant State's Attorney Mark Cavins stated that those cases will most likely not be brought to trial.

Both of these recent cases and their relatively lenient sentences are reminiscent of the verdict in Vincent Chin's case. Perhaps the only difference is the lack of community outrage - the diminishing societal reaction - to such racist acts of violence.

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kasia is a third-year law student at the University of Southern California Law School.