In 2008, Thanh Tan Phan was a hardened member of a Little Saigon criminal street gang called Cadi Lost Boys and one night at the Pho Hoa An restaurant in Garden Grove he participated in a senseless, brutal knife attack on a UC Irvine student and another young man eating with their girlfriends.
Phan's new home is nowadays the lovely California State Prison at Sacramento.
The rural, maximum security prison apparently isn't hospitable and he wants out as soon as possible.
]
To help accelerate his return to society, Phan appealed his 2010 attempted
murder, assault with a deadly weapon, gang membership and street terrorism convictions by claiming his jury should have convicted him of
nothing worse than voluntary manslaughter.
This month, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana considered Phan's argument: that he and his hoodlum pals had reacted in the sudden heat of passion when Tuan Nguyen, who'd been sitting with UCI student Tran Vo, gave them a “mad dog” stare.
The appellate court justices weren't impressed, especially because it took the gangsters at least 15 minutes to decide to attack.
They rejected the appeal.
(Note to the knucklehead underworld: Courts won't consider an unfriendly stare as legal justification for a beating or a killing.)
Upshot:
Phan, 32, will continue to serve a term of 15 years to life and when he's
done with that punishment he has to serve an additional 14 years.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
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.