Poor David Dae Hong Kim.
No, Buena Park's Kim is literally dirt poor.
He earns 13 cents an hour working in a prison laundry room and is irked that the government wants to take about half of that impressive income and give it to another man.
Outrageous, isn't it?
Well, no.
In March 2008, 17-year-old Kim, a Sunny Hills High School student, and his fellow Korean criminal street gang punks decided to prove their toughness by trying to kill an innocent man visiting Emery Park in Fullerton.
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According to law enforcement reports, Kim was the leader of the scumbags, who repeatedly shoved a knife into Jack Stotts and then took turns beating him with a baseball bat.
A gang unit prosecutor in the Orange County District Attorney's Office charged Kim, a minor, as an adult and won 2009 convictions on gang and attempted murder charges.
After noting that Kim was remorseless, Superior Court Judge W. Michael Hayes sentenced him to a lengthy prison trip that would make sure the defendant won't spend even one minute of his 20s and 30s living in freedom.
Off the thug went to be lost in some disgusting California hellhole where he could show his toughness each day with other equally brilliant and charming men.
But Kim re-emerged, at least on paper, to complain that it was unfair that Hayes had ordered him to pay $9,153 in victim restitution for the medical bills and lost wages to Stotts.
Get this: the hoodlum says the requirement is too tough because he's so poor and he needs his laundry room wages to buy hygiene products and snacks from the prison commissary.
Boo-hoo.
That's essentially what a California Court of Appeal in Santa Ana ruled about Kim's complaint this week.
In a five-page opinion written by Justice Richard Aronson on behalf of himself and justices William Rylaarsdam and Raymond Ikola, the appellate court backed Hayes' restitution order.
Upshot: Kim, 20, will remain an unhappy, tough guy inside Kern Valley State Prison, where he'll reside while he serves his 28 years to life sentence.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
