(Lily Chin, Activist Helen Zia, Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds)
"Today's decision makes me feel hopeful that there is still justice in this land. However, I am not happy. I lost my only son. I am not happy anymore." - Lily Chin, Vincent's mother ("2 Face Federal")
As a result of pressure by the American Citizens for Justice, Ebens and Nitz were charged with civil rights violations in November 1983 under the 1968 civil rights statute, which provides federal penalties for hate crimes. It was the first Asian-American case tried under this civil rights law (Woo).
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"I was one of the first to advise the USA not to prosecute it as a federal crime and this led to the involvement by the trial team from Washington DOJ. I just did not think there was enough evidence that there was a conspiracy based on race which led to the violence. Race may well have contributed to the mind set of the killers, but I didn't think there was sufficient evidence of an overt racial motive or purpose on their part. That is necessary for the case to be prosecuted in federal court, as distinguished from a state murder prosecution." -Ross Parker, former chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Michigan's Eastern District (Parker, Interview)
"It should never have happened. [And] it had nothing to do with the auto industry or Asians or anything else. Never did, never will. I could have cared less about that. That's the biggest fallacy of the whole thing." --Ronald Ebens, Chin's accused killer in an interview 30 years later (Guillermo)
"Losing the legal effort in its first national campaign of this magnitude of five years of intensive organizing did not devastate the Asian-American community; instead, it had been transformed." - Helen Zia, journalist and activist (Zia, 80)
Katelyn Khounsourath
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