Racially Profiled, Sentenced to Die: Who Was Chol Soo Lee?

SARA SIDNER: The lines that divide countries are also powerful in dividing society from within. As for example, racism carves its own boundaries. A victim of racial profiling, Korean Immigrant Chol Soo Lee was sentenced to life in prison for San Francisco murder he did not commit. In 1970s America, his case inspired a grassroots social justice movement in the Asian American community. Now, another critically acclaimed documentary, “Free Chol Soo Lee,” traces his story and the movement that led to his release. Hari Sreenivasan talked to co-directors Julie Ha and Eugene Yi, about the life and legacy of Lee.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Thanks. Julie Ha, Eugene Yi, thanks so much for joining us. First, Julie, for people who might not have watched the documentary, who is Chol Soo.

JULIE HA, CO-DIRECTOR, “FREE CHOL SOO LEE”: Chol Soo Lee, he’s the — he was a Korean immigrant who was wrongfully convicted of a Chinatown gang murder in San Francisco in the 1970s. And his case gets picked up by a Korean American journalist working for a mainstream newspaper, who investigates and writes a series of stories that help trigger a landmark, Pan Asian American social justice movement, to free Chol Soo Lee. And so, the story tells that story of his conviction, his — the fight for his release. But also, what happens to him after his release. Unfortunately, it’s not a fairytale ending.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. Eugene, let’s start at the beginning, if we can. What — how did he grow up? What was his life like?

EUGENE YI, CO-DIRECTOR, “FREE CHOL SOO LEE”: So, Chol Soo Lee was a child of the Korean War. He was born during the Korean War, actually on the — the day that would become Korean — or Korean Liberation Day, August 15th, in a broken home. And his mother married a GI, and came to United States. He would join her once he was 12. After growing up in dire poverty, in Korea, in South Korea. And — but once he came to the United States, it wasn’t quite the American dream that he had been hoping for. He had been hoping to come and be able to work and save money and send it money back to his aunt and uncle in Korea. But instead, he met a series of obstacles that just made his life here very, very difficult. He was bullied severely in the school. He was — he was actually sort of gotten to a fight quite early on, was taken to the principal — vice principal. An altercation ensued between him and the vice principal and he was charged with battery as a child, as a minor. And that sort of started him on his course through the school to prison pipeline that sort of was really the beginning of kind of the difficulties that he had in America, that, in some ways, culminated with his arrest in 1973 for his murder that he did not commit.

CHOL SOO LEE, KOREAN AMERICAN IMMIGRANT: One night, the manager showed me his gun. It was the first time I ever held a gun before. I asked if I could borrow it. Back in my place, I was cocking it back and forth, you know, messing around with it. Then I accidentally shot the wall. Five days later, I was arrested. But when he told me it was for a murder, I couldn’t believe what they were saying.

SREENIVASAN: You know, Julie, let’s talk a little bit about the murder and the circumstances surrounding it. You go into the kind of initial police reports. What was — kind of at the core, what was wrong with that conviction in the first place?

HA: Yes. You know, when they arrested Chol Soo Lee, the reason the police focused on him was because they found a report of a police gun accident that Chol Soo Lee was involved in just a couple days prior to the murder. And so, they did do a ballistics report. And basically, that instance was about Chol Soo Lee accidentally firing his gun, in his room. And the police came and recovered the bullets from the room. Nobody was hurt, it was just lodged into the wall. But once the police did a ballistics test, looking at the bullets and the bullets that were used in the actual murder, they actually said it was a match. Later, it was discovered that it was not a match, but that’s what set them on the court even to focus on Chol Soo Lee. And then — but when you look at when they got to the actual murder trial, they had already discovered that that was a mistake and he, Chol Soo, was convicted not based on material evidence, but based on the witness accounts of three white tourists who saw the killer for mere seconds from quite a distance away. You know, you’ll — in our film, you will see that, you know, even during the murder trial, it’s quite astounding because at one point, the arresting police officer points to Chol Soo Lee and says, yes, that’s the man I arrested. But he says that Chinese man sitting there. And even Chol Soo’s court appointed defense attorney did not correct that for the record and say, Chol Soo Lee really is actually a Korean, not Chinese. And so, you know, there was some kind of racial profiling that seemed quite evident in this case. And, you know, K.W. Lee, the journalist in the investigation on this case, he even made note of how when he talked to people on the ground in Chinatown, many people actually knew that, you know, Chol Soo didn’t commit this murder, they knew who the real killer was. And also, they knew a Chinatown gangs would not have hired Chol Soo Lee, a Korean, to — for this killing.

SREENIVASAN: At the time of his initial incarceration, it wasn’t as big a story as it became after a single journalist started to investigated into this. And tell us about the role that K.W. Lee played as a journalist and then, really, as someone in Chol Soo Lee’s life.

HA: That’s right. Chol Soo Lee was already four years into his life sentence by the time K.W. Lee stumbled upon the case. And K.W. heard about the case from a Korean American social worker who just said in passing, it’s so said, there’s this young man and I think he was, you know, railroaded for this murder. And so, K.W. Lee like was surprised to hear about this Korean American who had been convicted by a jury of a Chinatown gang murder. So, he looked into the case, and he was shocked that he was already finding evidence that seemed to really poke holes in the police and San Francisco D.A.’s investigation and prosecution of Chol Soo Lee. He actually — you know, I think it’s worth noting that he worked for a Sacramento newspaper called “The Sacramento Union,” and he worked for six months looking into this case on his own time and was just shocked by what he discovered. K.W. told us that actually this was like the first time in his long — decades-long career as a reporter where he did a story about a Korean immigrant, and he felt a real connection, even after — you know, he wrote a total about 100 stories on the Chol Soo Lee case.

SREENIVASAN: So, Eugene, it is not a simple narrative of an innocent man is behind bars because while Chol Soo Lee is in prison, he’s accused of a murder within the walls. How did K.W. Lee and, I guess, the movement that sprung up around Chol Soo Lee deal with that?

YI: You’re right. It’s a very difficult thing to try to convince folks of the innocents of this when he had to kill, in self-defense, while he was behind bars. Another sad aspect of a timing of Chol Soo’s life was that there was a tremendous violence in the California prison system at the time. And that’s where Chol Soo ended up and that’s how he got caught up in this situation. But to some level, it is a credit to two things. One, to the organizational abilities of the Korean immigrants who are there at the time. There was a community of Korean immigrants in Sacramento that K.W. was a part of, and that formed a financial and an organization backbone for a lot of the efforts. And the other part is really credit to K.W. Lee’s ability and the way that his stories were able to frame Chol Soo’s plight into something that was broadly legible to the population at the time.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Leonard, what’s to be gained by all this support? Anything?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You make it sound contrived. These people came because they wanted to come. So, they are doing it because they feel it is right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Freedom for Chol Soo Lee. Freedom for Chol Soo Lee. Freedom for Chol Soo Lee. Freedom for Chol Soo Lee.

SREENIVASAN: This didn’t automatically turn into, all right, let’s open the gates and let him out. I mean, this was a long process.

HA: This was a long process. You know, Chol Soo was in prison for 10 years. The movement start — the movement lasted six years. So, sustained efforts of this very, you know, unique combination of people, as Eugene mentioned, Korean immigrants working alongside their third generation Asian American, you know, young student activists, many of them, but working for six years to free Chol Soo Lee. And having to — basically, you know, they raised money through a lot of $5, $10 donations in order to hire good defense attorneys for Chol Soo Lee and a good defense investigator. And that’s how a lot of this evidence or even a new witness was uncovered. But it was — you know, I think if you ask any lawyer to overturn two murder convictions is unheard of in our criminal justice system. And so, in many ways, it’s an extraordinary movement. They sort of did the impossible.

SREENIVASAN: Chol Soo was in prison for 10 years. After he got out, or after he was released, his life was by no means smooth sailing. Tell us about some of the challenges he faced.

YI: Yes. I mean, I do want to foreground just everything he had been through in his life before then. You know, from ages 20 through 30, he was in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. We don’t get into it much in the film, but he spent much of that time in solitary confinement as well, which, of course, intensifies that experience. And so, he had spent his entire adult life behind bars, essentially, and didn’t know how to be functioning on the outside, outside of institutional context. So, there are the demons of institutionalization that have forced he was going to be less (INAUDIBLE). There is everything he went through in his childhood, just from, again, coming — growing up as a child of a war in a broken home and being in that school to prison pipeline the way he had been. So, beyond that, on top of that, you throw on this — the stature that he gained, you know. And he spoke on that to a certain extent that, you know, this was — this kind of iconic status was not something that he asked for. And so, as he grappled with that, it wore on him and he really struggled with so much of it, but he struggled with disappointing all of the activists so much because, you know, what we would often talk about was that the activists and his supporters often became something of a circus family fort (ph). And they really tried to do what they could to help support him. But at that time, there was no sense of what coming back into society would involve. There is no sense of this conversation about — around recidivism (ph) that we have more of now. And so, in that context, Chol Soo, you know, he fell into addiction and his life kind of spiraled out in the way that anybody who has dealt with a family member or a loved one who has a struggle with addiction knows all too well how that can go.

SREENIVASAN: Julia, why make this film? Why make this documentary?

HA: Yes. Well, if — the story is not known, and it needs to be known. This is an important part of history, not just Asian American history, I would argue for American history. And I happen to have gone to the funeral of Chol Soo Lee in 2014. And it was actually there where I feel like looking back, the seeds were probably planted to make this film. The activists who had come to Chol Soo’s aid decades earlier where there. K.W. Lee was there. And there was an emotion in there that just felt beyond grief for someone they had lost him and cared about that felt like there was just this intense heaviness. I was struck by how a couple of the activists were saying Chol Soo did more for them than he — you know, than they did for him. Just deep regret that they didn’t do enough. And at one point, K.W. Lee stood up and he was clutching this Buddhist monk’s walking stick that Chol Soo had carve for him and he just said angrily, like, why is this story still underground after all these years? This landmark Asian American social justice movement that coalesced around this poor Korean immigrant street kid, overturned two murder convictions, and succeeded in freeing him from prison? Why is this case not known? It’s not even taught in American Asian studies in universities and colleges. And that was a deep ache for him because, I think, he knew how singular the story was and how consequential it could be. And that there could be a meaningful legacy even today. And that’s why we made the film. This story was too important to let it stay buried in history. And we just had to excavate it and tell it while some of the firsthand sources were still alive to share the story.

SREENIVASAN: Julie, what is it about now that makes this film more relevant? I mean, we have just lived through — or are living through a pandemic, what we have seen increased amounts of violence against Asian Americans. We just recently had sort of another anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin go by. Why is this conversation important today?

HA: We feel like our film actually connects the dots between what’s happening now and our history, which is not known. Some people, you know, are surprised that there is — that racism against Asian Americans even exists and it’s not just microaggressions, it’s actually racism in the form of violence. We feel like our film is, you know, connecting to this history, where actually, there’s a long history event Asian racism that includes violence, that includes racial profiling and injustices within the criminal justice system. So, we feel like that history is just so important for us to know in order for it to feed our consciousness, and also, you know, how it affects our perspective today. Oftentimes, you know, I will say that Asian Americans maybe don’t see ourselves connected to issues of incarceration, policing in communities of color, reentry, but those are our issues too. And if we know our history, we will see those connections more. We will understand why it’s important, also, to care about Black Lives Matter and what is happening with other communities and other causes. We can come to see those very organic intersections. We feel like our film could help people draw some kind of inspiration from this group of people that came together at a time, I should note, when Asian Americans had very little political power. And yet, they formed this movement against incredible odds. They fought and stood up to the criminal justice system, and they asserted this very important principle, you know. They coalesced around not somebody who was some undergrad at U.C. Berkeley who was wrongly convicted. It was this poor Korean immigrant street kid who had a criminal record at the time, who was no model minority. And yet, they looked at him and said, you are worthy of our time, attention, love and care, and we will dedicate six years of our lives to freeing you from prison. And I think that’s such a powerful principle and act of courage, conviction and compassion that could really just have such a lasting inspiration today. And in a way, you know, extend the legacy of Chol Soo Lee in a way that I think would have wanted to see.

SREENIVASAN: Eugene Yi, Julie, thank you both so much.

HA: Thank you.

YI: Thank you so much for having us.