Reenactment of Vincent Chin trial kicks off Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

To kick off Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the Federal Bar Association's Northern District of California chapter staged a reenactment of the trial proceedings following the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man bludgeoned to death by two white autoworkers. The killing, which occurred during a time of strong anti-Japanese sentiment because of competition within the automotive industry, is widely considered to be an inflection point in the Asian American civil rights movement. 

During Wednesday evening's event at the Phillip Burton U.S. Courthouse in San Francisco, members of the bar and federal judges performed a script by the Asian American Bar Association of New York based on actual trial proceedings against Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz. According to eyewitness accounts, Ebens, a Chrysler plant supervisor, split Chin's head open with a baseball bat while his stepson Nitz, a laid-off autoworker, held Chin down. 

U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson, who played the late U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the Eastern District of Michigan, said she remembered hearing about the case in college and as a law student at UC Berkeley. "One thing I hope people walk away with tonight is we do not want to repeat history with the same fear-based politics and vitriol. Hopefully, this is a reminder of all the lives impacted by one moment of hate," said Thompson. 

Ebens and Nitz accepted a plea bargain to reduce the charges from second-degree murder to manslaughter. Judge Charles Kaufman with the Third Circuit Court of Michigan sentenced the men to three years of probation and ordered them to pay a $3,000 fine, later commenting that they "weren't the kind of men you send to jail ... you don't make the punishment fit the crime, you make the punishment fit the criminal." 

After widespread public outcry across Detroit, where the murder took place, and elsewhere in the U.S., Ebens and Nitz were charged with violating Chin's civil rights on account of his race. The jury acquitted Nitz but Ebens was found guilty and sentenced by Diggs Taylor to 25 years in prison. An appellate court later overturned the conviction. Following intense public pressure, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered a retrial that took place in Cincinnati, as Diggs Taylor did not believe an impartial jury could be found in Detroit. Ebens was acquitted after the retrial and has not spent a day in prison for Chin's murder. 

Jonathan Lee, an assistant U.S. attorney and the bar association's vice president of government relations, said the Contra Costa County Bar Association had put on a reenactment of the Chin trial and he suggested the program to the Federal Bar Association's Northern District of California chapter. He said violence toward Asian Americans is not a new phenomenon but has spiked in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, so it is important to tell Chin's story. "All of the civil rights that we have in this country, to the extent that we have them, is because some heroic individual decided to take a stand against the oppression of the majority," said Lee, praising Chin's mother for advocating for a federal hate crime prosecution in the years after her son's death. 

Valerie Stewart, the bar association's vice president for Oakland, said the organization strives to hold programs emphasizing the importance of the rule of law in society. "If we don't talk about what we've done right and what we've done wrong historically, we can't make any progress," said Stewart.