There may have been screams of joy in a California prison last night and cries of frustration inside the district attorney’s office.
Late yesterday afternoon, a California Court of Appeal overturned an Orange County jury’s 2007 special circumstances murder convictions and a judge’s multiple life sentences against Little Saigon’s Son Ngoc Nguyen.
The 24-year-old Nguyen admitted that in 2005 he drove a car occupied by Tri “Boney” Huynh, a convicted killer and “hothead” member of the Tiny Rascal‘s criminal street gang. But he said he was unaware that the gangster had a handgun tucked into his waistband and planned to execute others outside Westminster’s Hai Do Restaurant over a $1,300 debt and an argument at the Shark Club in Costa Mesa.
Westminster Police detective Tim Walker–a Vietnamese gang expert, prosecutor Jim Mendelson, Judge James A. Stotler and a jury concluded that Nguyen, whom Walker called a member of the Viet Family gang, shared responsibility for the crimes largely because he served as the getaway driver.
While Nguyen sat in his car outside the restaurant, Huynh fired multiple shots including three which were fired at near point blank range into Dung Nguyen‘s head, according to police records.
“Nguyen [who denied gang affiliation] argues there was insufficient evidence to support his convictions for the murder of Dung Nguyen and the attempted murder of Huong Nguyen,” wrote Justice Kathleen O’Leary for a three-member appellate panel. “We agree.”
The justices went on the label the government’s case against Nguyen as “too speculative.”
“The inference the jury was asked to draw was that Boney could rely on Nguyen to be his wheel man and, therefore, Nguyen shared Boney’s intent to kill,” the opinion says. “But there is insufficient evidence to establish these crimes were gang crimes and to support a reasonable inference that Nguyen would have known Boney’s intentions.”
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.