SPOKANE — Attorney Mark D. Kamitomo is asking for a new trial in a medical malpractice case after learning that some jurors allegedly mocked his Japanese heritage during closed-door deliberations.

The Spokane County jury ruled against Kamitomo's client, clearing a doctor accused of negligence in a cancer diagnosis.

But juror Jack Marchant sought out Kamitomo after the trial and told him five jurors — three women and two men — had disparaged Kamitomo in jury proceedings, calling him "Mr. Kamikaze," "Mr. Miyashi" and "Mr. Miyagi," a character in the movie "The Karate Kid."

Washington -- Authorities at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where two Indian students were murdered on Thursday night, swiftly moved to set up a “Komma and Allam Support Fund” to assist the families of the dead students.

The fund is named after the murdered students, Komma Chandrasekhar Reddy, 31, and Allam Kiran Kumar, 33.

Stung by criticism about neglecting security at the campus, authorities yesterday belatedly moved in to ensure visible vigilance at the Edward Gay Apartments, the scene of the murders, and other housing units on the notoriously insecure campus.

The LSU police department, working with the Baton Rouge police department, the East Baton Rouge parish sheriff’s office, and the Louisiana State Police, with assistance from the FBI, has launched an intense manhunt for three men, said to be African Americans, who were seen leaving the scene of the murders shortly before the bodies were discovered.

Friends and colleagues of slain attorney Robert Wone crowded into a meeting room at the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. for a press conference on Monday, Aug. 6. Wone, 32, was stabbed to death in a college friend’s townhome northeast of Dupont Circle last year, and no arrests have been made.

Attorney Benjamin Razi, a former colleague of Wone who now represents his widow Katherine Wone, said of the press conference, “I hope that the passion of this group will get the city’s attention and motivate people to action.”

“Everybody we’d been able to talk to now has a lawyer, so there hasn’t been a lot of keeping in contact,” said Capt. C.V. Morris, head of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s violent crime section, of the men present in the home when Wone was stabbed. “That’s the card we were dealt. There’s no reason to try [to contact] them at this point.”

The event took place in a large meeting room where Robert Wone had organized an attorney development seminar in April 2006. After brief introductory remarks from Covington & Burling attorney Benjamin Razi, Kathy Wone was the first to speak. She thanked everyone for attending.

Robert Eric Wone, general counsel for Radio Free Asia, President-Elect of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association-DC, and general counsel to the Organization of Chinese Americans, died of stab wounds on August 3, 2006. He was 32 years old, and, the month prior, had just left the law firm of Covington & Burling to work for Radio Free Asia. A strange mystery continues to surround his brutal and senseless murder. Who would want to kill someone as generous, well-liked, and compassionate as Robert Wone?

By Mari Matsuda
Address to Na Loio No Na Kanaka Annual Fundraiser
October 2005

We are the children of the migrant workers
We are the offspring of the concentration camp
Sons and daughters of the railroad builder
Who leave their stamp on Amerika

We are the children of the Chinese waiter,
Born and raised in the laundry room
We are the offsping of the Japanese gardener
Who leave their stamp on Amerika

Those lyrics by Chris Iijima and Nobu Miyamoto created a community, by putting down on vinyl what they called “a song of ourselves,” at a time when we were otherwise absent from the space called popular culture. I first heard that song not off the famous Grain of Sand album, but sung at a nuclear free Hawaii fundraiser at Harris Memorial Church, performed by earnest young ethnic studies professors from the University of Hawaii. That song traveled from Harlem to Honolulu, it was part of a huge wave of activism that picked up Asian Americans across the nation and plucked them down in sit-ins and fundraisers and up against police lines where the motto “serve the people,” was not just theory, but also practice. It was life. It was music. It was a way to change the world, and Chris wrote the soundtrack.

Some say a white jury can't understand that Chai Soua Vang felt threatened by hunters

The chilling details of his actions - six dead, four shot in the back - make Chai Soua Vang an unlikely subject of sympathy. But like the O.J. Simpson case, the murder trial that ended Friday night with guilty verdicts on all counts has divided its audience into two camps, largely drawn by racial lines.

In the days leading up to the trial, for example, the case drew dozens of posts filled with raw emotions on the Hmong Today online community forum. Some contributors declared Vang innocent, and at least one deemed him a hero. Another person who identified himself as a hunter of Hmong descent called Vang's actions "outrageous and uncalled for" but said the history of racism in the Northwoods of Wisconsin prompted Vang to believe he needed to "kill or be killed." Phebe Saunders Haugen, a Hamline University law professor, does not doubt that racial overtones led to the bloodshed, a lesson that shouldn't be lost. But the former prosecutor was astonished that Vang was claiming self-defense.

Asian-American, other groups hope to avert bias

After six white hunters were shot dead in a confrontation with a Hmong man in northern Wisconsin last November, bumper stickers circulated that read: "Save a hunter, kill a Hmong."

Also, police arrested a white man suspected of painting the word killer on a truck and two trailer homes owned by Hmong neighbors in western Wisconsin.

Those types of incidents are exactly what Janet Lew Carr wants to prevent.

By Gladys Um
©2005 The Daily Princetonian
April 22, 2005

For two and a half years, Michael Lohman, a Ph.D. student in the applied math department, had been stalking Asian female students. He had been stealing their undergarments, cutting off their hair or squirting his semen and urine on them while riding the shuttle bus and pouring his bodily fluids into their drinks in the Graduate College and Fine Hall.

According to an article in The Advocate, Lohman has been accused of nearly 80 offenses: contaminating about 50 drinks, squirting semen and urine on about 20 women and snipping the hair of at least eight women. "And those are probably conservative numbers," Princeton Borough Police Lt. Dennis McManimon is reported to have said in the same article.

As disgusting as Lohman's offenses may be, equally disturbing is the fact that it took the University and the Department of Public Safety two-and-a-half years to take any serious action. The complaints started coming in as early as October of 2002, when DPS received a report about a white man introducing an unidentified liquid into an Asian woman's drink. Similar incidents of beverage tampering were reported in April 2003 and May 2004. In spite of the striking details they shared, these reports were treated by DPS as isolated incidents. What is one to make of the length of time that elapsed and the number of women who were allowed to be victimized before the authorities finally managed to connect the dots?

PRINCETON, N.J. -- A Princeton University graduate student has been barred from campus after he was accused of surreptitiously cutting locks of hair from women on campus and pouring bodily fluids into women's drinks.

The law is hard enough to understand.

Trying to understand it in a foreign language and without a lawyer is a daunting task.

Alex Saingchin is fully aware of both.

The second-year student at Rutgers' School of Law in Newark spends hours perusing the intricacies of the legal system. But an interest in public service led him to enlist friends in an effort to take their burgeoning expertise to Asian-Americans in need.

Asian-American attorneys remain few in numbers

By Jason Kosareff
©2005 San Gabriel Valley Tribune
February 12, 2005

When attorney Daniel Deng goes to court to defend a client, it is not uncommon for other lawyers, bailiffs and judges to assume he is a Mandarin translator. "In a courthouse, Asians are either a defendant or a translator," Deng said. "There are very few attorneys."

Lawyers like Deng, whose Rosemead practice is a smashing success among Asians in Los Angeles County, are few and far between in the national picture of the justice system.

Asian Americans make up 2.3 percent of the nation's 871,115 lawyers, according to the American Bar Association's Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession. They comprise 4.4 percent of the national population and 13 percent of the California population, according to the Census.

San Jose police on Sunday identified the man who was shot and killed by an officer early Saturday as Hai Nguyen, 22.

Nguyen held police at bay at his home for 2 1/2 hours before allegedly pointing a gun at them, prompting an officer to open fire. A single gunshot to his chest killed him instantly as he stood just inside his open garage about 1:35 a.m. The officer was identified as Richard Foster, a 12-year veteran of the department and a canine officer.

Foster was placed on routine administrative leave as the investigation into the incident continues.

Nearly two months after a state court overturned the murder conviction of David Wong, an illegal Chinese immigrant accused of stabbing a fellow inmate in an upstate prison in 1986, prosecutors in Plattsburgh, N.Y., announced yesterday that they had filed a motion to dismiss the charges.

If the motion is approved, as expected, by Judge Richard C. Giardino of Fulton County, it will mark the legal end of a case that has attracted the attention of Asian-Americans around the country. But any celebration for Mr. Wong might be short-lived and bittersweet, since he is expected to be deported to China, meaning that his first taste of freedom in two decades would be not in the United States, but in Hong Kong or China.

Mr. Wong, now 42, was serving time for armed robbery when he was charged with fatally stabbing Tyrone Julius at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, about 17 miles west of Plattsburgh. And though there was no physical evidence or obvious motive, Mr. Wong was found guilty based on the testimony of two witnesses and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

The U.S. Olympic tae kwon do team's only two members testified via telephone from Athens yesterday that ousted local coach Dae Sung Lee would be a distraction if he were to coach them at the Olympics.

"It hurts me right now that I bother those athletes," said Lee, after a hearing in federal court in Honolulu yesterday. But Lee said he believes Nia Abdallah and Steven Lopez were coached to respond that way.

U.S. Judge Susan Oki Mollway is expected to rule today on whether to grant Lee's request for a court order to allow him to serve as a certified coach of the tae kwon do Olympic team in the 2004 Olympic Games, which begin today.

Lee, founder and master teacher at the United States Taekwondo Center in Aina Haina, filed suit July 28 against the U.S. Taekwondo Union and U.S. Olympic Committee alleging breach of contract and race discrimination. Lee alleged he was removed because he is a Korean American and because he had a good relationship with the union's former governing body largely made up of Korean Americans.

It isn't over till it's over, says Seattle-based maverick trial lawyer Harish Bharti about a jury dropping charges against Boeing Company of discrimination against Indian Americans and other Asians workers.

Bharti lost his bid to hold Boeing responsible for discriminating against Indian Americans and other Asians in its hiring, salary, and firing practices. The lawyer known for taking on class action suits against corporate giants is filing an appeal within the next few weeks.

On June 2, a federal jury in the court of US District Court Judge Robert Lasnik decided the aircraft manufacturer had not discriminated against Asian Americans and other minority employees in terms of pay or job promotions.

"Brown v. Board of Education was not written for Blacks alone"

By William O. Douglas
Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
August 25, 1971

Applicants are Americans of Chinese ancestry who seek a stay of a Federal District Court's order reassigning pupils of Chinese ancestry to elementary public schools in San Francisco. The order was made in a school desegregation case, the San Francisco Unified School District having submitted a comprehensive plan for desegregation which the District Court approved.

There are many minorities in the elementary schools of San Francisco; and while the opinion of the District Court mentions mostly the Blacks, there are in addition to whites, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Americans both of African and Spanish ancestry. The schools attended by the class here represented are filled predominantly with children of Chinese ancestry---in one 456 out of 482, in another 230 out of 289, and in a third, 1,074 out of 1,111.

Filed by Fred Korematsu et al.
Amicus Curiae Brief
U.S. Supreme Court, Docket No. 03-1027
Filed April 2004

The history of the detention of Japanese American citizens during World War II, and the legislation that followed, demonstrate that the Executive Branch does not have the unilateral power to detain an American citizen indefinitely, without charges or access to counsel.

The internment of 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II was one of the darkest moments in American history. The American people have recognized that the indefinite detention of these citizens, without charges, was not justified. Indeed, to prevent such acts, Congress repealed the Emergency Detention Act of 1950.

Now, we stand at another crossroads where we face the same question – what circumstances, if any, justify the indefinite detention of an American citizen for suspicious activities, without charges or access to counsel?