Homemade porn doesn’t often get aired in Orange County courthouses, but today jurors in the trial against a jail deputy accused of allowing a killer inmate to enjoy sex dates, drugs, steaks, candy and a cell phone in exchange for bribes saw three, graphic iPhone video clips.
The no-audio footage, shot by Stephenson Choi Kim, shows him kissing Ha Duc Nguyen, repeatedly fondling her exposed breasts, mugging for the camera, squeezing his crotch through his orange jail jumpsuit and then exposing his erect penis.
In at least a half dozen segments, Kim–who walked into a crowded Cypress restaurant in 2004 and murdered a woman he didn’t know while seriously wounding six other diners to impress his gang–enthusiastically worked his hard-on while taking shots of Nguyen, who seems to be moaning as if stimulated by an active vaginal vibrator.
At one point, Kim stopped pinching and pulling on Nguyen’s nipples and filmed himself sliding a finger in and out of her mouth.
Underscoring this latest embarrassment for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, not only were the scenes shot on different days, but the lights were on in the visitor’s area where deputies, who make well more than $125,000 annually, stand just a few feet away, allegedly oblivious to the scene.
Prosecutor Aleta Bryant is asking a jury of eight women and four men to convict David Lloyd Cass for knowingly turning the Orange County Jail into Kim’s pleasure palace for two years in exchange for gifts like expensive Burke Williams Day Spa certificates.
Nobody is disputing that Kim and Nguyen engaged in oral, anal and vaginal sex as many as 30 times without detection in the government facility. It was during these exploits that Nguyen testified that she lost her virginity.
Defense lawyer Lewis Rosenblum introduced the films to poke holes in Nguyen’s prior claims that Cass always turned the lights off for the couple’s sexual interludes in Booth A of the jail’s Attorney-Bonds area. Rosenblum also got the prosecution’s star witness to concede she and the killer scattered legal documents on a table as a way of tricking nearby deputies into believing they were discussing legal matters.
According to Rosenblum, Cass was nice to Kim and chatty with Nguyen, but unaware of the sex or their accomplished smuggling operation. The former prosecutor has now spent hours catching Nguyen in contradictory statements about the deputy and there’s likely to be more intense grilling for her this afternoon inside Superior Court Judge Patrick H. Donahue’s courtroom.
A raid on Nguyen’s home recovered Kim’s porn.
Kim, 33, narrowly escaped California’s notorious Death Row and instead is serving a life sentence without the possibility of ever returning to freedom.
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.