From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: Part III

As a result of growing public dissent and Zia's press releases, Judge Charles Kaufman's office was flooded with hundreds of angry phone calls from the public.

He maintained an amicable relationship with his first wife and their child.

But the public scrutiny and media notoriety caused the already-shy Nitz to retreat even further from everyone close to him.

But Nitz's fears were not unfounded. Ever since he and Ebens were found guilty of manslaughter, harassment had started.

This crime, McWhirter wrote, was “no act of self defense. It was a willful act of mayhem which resulted in the death of an innocent person. It deserves punishment, and for other reasons than simple retribution."

"You have raised the ugly ghost of racism, suggesting in explanation of your sentence that the lives of the killers are of great and continuing value to society, implying they are of greater value than the life of the slain victim, upon which you put a price of $6,000, total. How gross and ostentatious of you; how callous and, yes, unjust."

"You have raised the ugly ghost of racism, suggesting in explanation of your sentence that the lives of the killers are of great and continuing value to society, implying they are of greater value than the life of the slain victim, upon which you put a price of $6,000, total. How gross and ostentatious of you; how callous and, yes, unjust."

In fact, in the ensuing months, Detective Roberts would pose with the baseball bat for newspaper interviews, saying, "Some heavy sucker, eh?''

Chan had even volunteered to work for free, on a pro bono basis.

"It soon became clear that there were failures at every step of the criminal justice process," Zia wrote in her memoir. "The police and court record was slipshod and incomplete."

Although Perry's statement had been submitted to the prosecutor's office, no one pursued Perry for further questioning. This oversight bothered Chan, who felt Perry's testimony could have been a “missing link” in the case.

To Zia, Chan, and the ACJ, the words "It's because of you," spoken in early 1980s Detroit, where xenophobia against Japan had risen due to the competition from Japanese import car companies, were racially charged.

Ever since he sentenced Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, his office had been flooded with angry letters and phone calls condemning his decision. The outrage shocked him. "In all my years, I have never received such vilification," he told The Detroit News.

In the early 1960s, Kaufman was one of a group of lawyers who had created the Fund for Equal Justice, which provided legal assistance for civil rights activists, prisoners, women's organizations, and marginalized and financially disadvantaged individuals.

"When Judge Kaufman said, 'You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal,' he uses that to excuse their behavior," Wu explained. "But in assessing guilt or innocence, you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to look at just that specific act.”

Meanwhile the revered elder Detroit Chinatown spokesman and the first ACJ president Kin Yee slammed Judge Kaufman's decision to give Ebens and Nitz probation, saying it was no more than "a $3,000 license to commit murder, provided that you have a steady job or if you are a student."

"We have asked Judge Kaufman, on his own motion, to review the record and take notice of the substantial material errors and take all appropriate and necessary action to rectify the record," Chan told reporters.

"One of his remarks that the killers are gainfully employed and they would not be doing the same thing again and that's why he was only giving them probation, we felt that a Chinese life was worth a lot more than that,” Yee said.

Fleas, parasites, malnutrition, and infections led to Kaufman and the others suffering from boils, hepatitis, jaundice, dengue fever, dysentery, malaria, beriberi, and other diseases.

As a man of the law, Judge Kaufman focused on the legal definition of manslaughter. These two men had beaten Vincent "too severely in careless reckless disregard of human life which is what manslaughter is," he concluded. "And that's what they were found guilty of and that's what I predicated my sentence on. Had it been a brutal murder, of course these fellows would be in jail now."

The judge firmly denied all accusations of racism, including speculation that his POW experience may have influenced his probation decision.

"Our motion is not prompted by a desire for revenge...but because we believe errors in fact were presented to the court at sentencing,” Hoekenga concluded amidst applause from spectators.

Ultimately, Judge Kaufman's son Richard, also a Wayne County circuit judge, felt his father's harrowing experience in the Japanese prisoner of war camp influenced him to reconsider his original sentence.

"'Real Americans Buy American' continues to be one of the more popular sayings gracing the large chrome bumpers of cars in Detroit," wrote Matt Beers for The Detroit News. "The case of Vincent Chin has peeled back those slogans, showing that what makes them cling to the chrome is a powerful and ugly undercurrent of racism. It's a revelation that Detroit will not soon forget."

Roland Hwang and James Shimoura credit this multicultural coalition for helping to open doors for the ACJ. Prosecutor William Cahalan "wasn't interested in meeting a bunch of Asian American lawyers and community activists," Hwang said. "It took people like Horace Sheffield, head of the Detroit Area Black Organizations, and other groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, to be added to the chorus. They were instrumental in getting us an audience with the prosecutor."

If they chose to remain silent now, they would be just as complicit in Vincent's death.

The march ended at the steps of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Michigan. Kin Yee stood in front of the imposing gray building, with the words THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA carved in stone above his head.

Yee and the ACJ then officially hand-delivered a petition with three thousand signatures to U.S. Attorney Leonard Gilman, demanding a federal intervention into the Vincent Chin case.

In 1983, having specialized in civil rights law, Kwoh cofounded the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, which provided legal services for the Asian American community with an emphasis on advocacy and civil rights.

"These attacks on Asian Americans are no different than the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan against Blacks in the South,” he declared.

"Since Vincent's death, we let the whole world know that we're not so easy to be brushed off,” Kin Yee said. "We had to be contended with."

Ronald Ebens, one of the defendants at the bar, accosted him with racial slurs and obscenities...

What did the defendants get for this heinous and utterly repugnant crime?

Now Cahalan is trying to cover-up his incompetence, and says he's
satisfied with the way his men handled the case.

"He's not going to subvert the law in response to public pressure," he said.

In a scathing editorial for Pacific Citizen, James Shimoura blasted Judge Kaufman's refusal to change his original sentence as "systemic failure."

Lily's fury and willingness to speak bluntly about what happened to her son defied the racist stereotypes of Asian women as quiet and submissive.

Many people now believed Vincent Chin's civil rights might have been violated. This opened up the possibility of a federal indictment because Ebens and Nitz could not be tried twice for the same crime of manslaughter.

"Vincent Chin's mother, Lily Chin, an immigrant from China who spent a lifetime of hard work in restaurants, laundries, and factories, became the moral conscience of this national campaign," Zia said.

“It's sort of a culmination of eight months of hard work trying to convince the Department of Justice and the American people that not only was a murder committed, but it was a serious violation of Vincent Chin's civil rights."