Vincent Who?

On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin — a 27-year-old Chinese American — went to a Detroit bar with three friends to celebrate his upcoming wedding. There, two white auto workers, Ronald Ebens and his step-son, Michael Nitz taunted him, reportedly calling him, a “Jap”. Ebens complained: “It’s because of you, motherfuckers, that we’re out of work!” When the fist fight broke out the manager evicted all of them.

Once outside Ebens and Nitz went to their car, took out a baseball bat from the trunk, and approached Chin and his companions who were waiting in the parking lot to be picked up by another friend. Chin and his friends started running. They were chased and hunted by Ebens and Nitz. They finally trapped Chin in front of a McDonald’s restaurant where Nitz held their prey while Ebens bludgeoned himwith a baseball bat.

Before he lost consciousness, Chin said to a friend: “It isn’t fair.” Four days later he died from severe head injuries. Several hundred people, originally invited to Chin’s wedding, attended instead his funeral.

Ebens was a foreman at an automobile plant. Nitz, who had been laid off, was going to school part-time. Soon after the incident Ebens also lost his job. At that time the American automobile industry was in a depression facing stiff competition from cars imported from Japan. Apparently Ebens mistook Vincent Chin for a Japanese.

Charged with second-degree murder, Ebens and Nitz were allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. On March 16, 1983 Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles S. Kaufman, after hearing arguments only from the defense attorneys and not from the prosecuting attorney, sentenced the two men to three years probation and fined each of them $3,000 plus $780 in fees.

Both of the criminals were permitted to “repay their debt” to society in monthly payment of $125. “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” commented Judge Kaufman. “We’re talking here about a man (Ebens) who’s held down a responsible job with the same company for seventeen or eighteen years and his son (Nitz) who is employed and is a part-time student….These men are not going to go out and harm somebody else. I just didn¹t think that putting them in prison would do any good for them or for society….You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”

“What kind of law is this? What kind of justice?” Vincent Chin’s mother, Lily Chin, angrily asked. “This happened because my son is Chinese. If two Chinese killed a white person, they must go to jail, maybe for their whole lives… Some thing is wrong with this country.” Across America, news, of Judge Kaufman’s sentences had been met with similar disbelief and outrage.

Asian Americans in Detroit immediately organized the American Citizens for Justice and demanded a review of the light sentences. They also urged the United States Department of Justice to investigate the violation of Chin’s federal civil rights by Ebens and Nitz. In the view of Asian Americans what Judge Kaufman did was to grant a $3,000 license to kill Asians. “Three thousand dollars can’t even buy a good used car these days, ” one of them remarked. “And this was the price of a life.”

In addition, several California congressmen wrote the US attorney general requesting an investigation of the crime a s well as the manner in which Wayne County officials had handled it. The Justice Department asked the FBI to carry out the investigation. Sufficient evidence of violation was found and a federal grand jury was convened in September 1983.

Two months later the grand jury indicted Ebens and Nitz on two counts. The following year they were in a U.S. district court whose jury convicted Ebens of violating Chin’s civil rights but acquitted him of conspiracy, while acquitting Nitz of both charges. Ebens was sentenced to 25 years in jail and was told to undergo treatment for alcoholism, but he was freed after posting a $20,00 bond.

Ebens’ attorney appealed the conviction and federal appeals court overturned it in September 1986 on a technicality: one of the attorneys for Americans Citizens for Justice, who had interviewed several of the prosecution’s witnesses, was said to have “improperly coached” them. The Justice Department ordered a retrial, which took place not in Detroit but in Cincinnati, a city whose residents not only had little exposure to Asian Americans in general but also were unfamiliar with the hostility that people in Detroit harbored against Japanese cars and Japanese-looking people. Much to the dismay of Asian Americans across the country, the Cincinnati jury acquitted Ebens of all charges. Neither he nor his stepson ever spent a day in jail. Lily Chin, Vincent’s mother, was so upset by the final outcome that she left the United States, a country where she felt no justice existed, to live in China.

Sources: Asian Americans: An Interpretive History by Sucheng Chan, Strangers from a Different Shore by Ronald Takaki and A Look Beyond the Model Minority Image, edited by Grace Yun.