Kick a bedroom door off its hinges.
3. Threaten to shoot your girlfriend in the head.
4. Make sure there are lots of witnesses to your behavior.
5. Break bottles in the house.
6. Weep in a drunken stupor until police arrive.
Given his extensive domestic violence history, Vinh Thanh Vo should have known the rules by now.
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But moments before 3:19 p.m. on March 3, 2008, Vo–then 39 years old–violated all of them, according to court records.
After Orange County prosecutors charged him, a jury convicted him of making criminal threats and Vo found himself facing his fifth felony strike. From a California prison where he's serving a 35 years to life sentence for his conduct that night, he appealed.
His argument?
He claimed that there was insufficient evidence that his girlfriend had been adequately frightened by his conduct to warrant a felony charge.
If the appellate judges could have laughed in response, they probably would have. They affirmed the case after noting that Vo also had been convicted in 1998 for chasing his then-wife out of the house while swinging a meat cleaver.
(Periodically at OCWeekly.com, discover the depths of human depravity in Orange County, California.)
Click HERE for previous “Citizen of the Week!” losers.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
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.
