Latest / Both Things Are True Crime / Eight Days Before Los Angeles Burned
Transcript
- latasha: Empire Liquor Market Delhi 91st in Figuora South Central Los Angeles Saturday morning March 16th, 1991. A fifteen year old black girl is standing at the counter with two dollars in her hand and the orange juice cost a dollar and seventy nine. And I wanna walk you through about four seconds because there's a security camera running. And this is one of the only times on this show I can tell you exactly what happened instead of what everybody else says happened. The woman behind the counter, she decides the girl is stealing. So she reaches over and she grabs her by the sweater and she pulls her towards the counter. And the girl hit her, deck her, right up in the face twice, so she can get loose. And then the woman, she goes behind the counter, right? And at some point she even throws a stool. And Then the girl, she picks up the orange juice and she sets it on the counter. She puts it down. She was leaving. So the woman, she reaches under the counter, right? And she comes up with a thirty-eight caliber revolver. The girl turns to walk out and she is shot in the back of the head from about three feet away. And she dies there. And she's still holding the two dollars. And the woman who shot her never spent one single day in custody for it and fourteen months later a California appeals court looked at it and said it was legal. Not right, not good, but legal. And that's the episode. How that is possible step by step with nobody breaking a single rule. But I'm not starting there because I'm not gonna make her a case before I make her a person. I'm gonna come back and stand in this exact spot in probably ten minutes if I don't, you know, talk too much. But first, I wanna tell you Who was holding in $2? So we're gonna talk about it. Latasha Harlands was born in East Saint Louis, Illinois in nineteen seventy-five. And I'm gonna be honest with you about something small, because I keep a rolling this show. Some sources disagree on her exact birthday. Some say July nineteen seventy five, some say January nineteen seventy six. I'm not gonna make up a birthday for a little girl, so my sentence just sounds cleaner. But she was fifteen and I've not seen anybody dispute that part at least. And she was the oldest of three. Her brother Vester came in nineteen seventy nine and her sister Christina came in nineteen eighty one. And when she was about six, the family they moved from East Saint Louis to South Central Los Angeles, near eighty ninth and Broadway. And that is about two blocks from where she died. In november nineteen eighty five, Latasha is about nine or ten years old, and her mother Crystal is shot and killed at a LA nightclub. And just kinda sitting there for a second, because before this girl was even eleven years old, she already lost her mother to a gun in that city in that decade. And her father was not in the picture. He left the state in nineteen eighty-five without saying goodbye. He did not come to her funeral. And I only know that actually because a judge said it out loud in a courtroom years later. So Latasha and Vester and Christina were raised by their grandmother, Ruth Harlands, who had come to LA from Tuscalouska, Alabama, and worked as a clerk. For county social services. So we have a grandmother raising three grandchildren on a county clerk salary in South Central in the 1980s. That's the household. That is who she was walking home to. And there's your girl, your herself, okay? On a row, not once consistently. She played basketball. She ran track. The little kids in the neighborhood, they called her Gizmo, okay? Because her bangs and her smile, and she was the one who made sure they got where they were going. Listen, if you've ever been the oldest, you know exactly what that is, okay? That specific child who is nine years old and is already running a household in her head. And then there's something that really kinda stopped me a little cold, and I'ma tell you straight out, it's the reason I could not put this case down. She wanted to go to USC and she wanted to be a lawyer. And I sat with that for a long time, right? Because the entire back half of this episode is me walking you through a courtroom and a probation statue and an appellate standard of review. All of that machinery, all of that language, and the girl at the center of it, she wanted to learn that language. Y'all, I'm trying I'm looking at the L the the L Sass. I'm like, what is this? I'm so confused. Like, my gosh, I can't believe I told people I wanted to be a lawyer. I am terrified now, but I'm not giving up. But this girl, she wanted to learn that language as well. She wanted to be the one standing up in that room. But instead she's the case name. She's in she's the fact section. She's the thing that I feel like the machinery got used on and I'm gonna say her name a lot tonight and that's not a bit I'm I'm being for real. She was gonna be a lawyer and instead she became a case and the least I can do is make sure the case still has her name on it when I'm done if that makes any sense. But I wanna put one more thing on the calendar before we get back to that store, okay? Because these are not two stories. This what I'm about to talk to you about, they're one story and if I keep them apart I feel like you won't really fully understand what 1992 actually was, okay? So Sunday, March 3rd, 1991, we're talking 13 days before. A man by a name we're all probably very familiar with, Rodney King, he gets pulled over after a chase on the 210 freeway, right? And he's on parole. He's been drinking. He shouldn't have run. Nobody argues this otherwise, okay? But then LA police officers beat him on the ground for a long time while a group of other officers stand there and watch. And they give this man 56 baton strikes by most counts, kicks. He was tased. He came out of it with a freaking fractured facial bone, a broken ankle, and just injuries all over him. And a man named George Holiday, who lived in an apartment, it was across the hall. He stands on his balcony and he has this new brand new camcorder and he records it. Which okay, I'm sorry, y'all, Dork moment again. Let's stop and kinda think what a camcorder would mean in nineteen ninety-one. At this point of life, there ain't no phone in anybody's pocket. There's no uploading, there's no comment section. For that to reach a single human being, a private citizen had to own an expensive piece of equipment, happened to be awake, happened to look outside, happened to hit record, and then physically carry the tape across town to a television station. Which is exactly what he did. He took it to the KTLA and then everybody saw it over and over for a year. So look at what thirteen days what happens in those thirteen days in one city. A tape of police beating a black man that the entire country watches. And then thirteen days later, a tape of a black child being shot in the back of the head in a corner store. Two tapes, 13 days, same city, same spring. And I think something a lot of people may forget about is that in both cases, the tape was supposed to be the thing that fixed it. That was genuinely like the belief at the time. Well, now there's video, so there's no argument. It'll be handled. But I want y'all to hold on to that because this episode is partially about finding out. what video is actually worth and I just this is all so interesting. So Saturday, March 16th, 1991. we're back over here, okay? And before I go and run the tape talk about the tape again, I want to give y'all the room because I feel like you really can't understand this case without it and I don't want to flatten it. All right. So by The early 1990s in LA, a lot of the corner stores in black neighborhoods were owned by Korean immigrant families. And see, this happened for reasons that have nothing to do with anybody standing in that store that morning. Okay. It happened because of immigration policy and redlining, because of which banks would lend to who, because of who could get a business loan and who could not. And because after the 1965 Watts uprising, a lot of previous owners, they just never came back. So you end up with a setup where immigrant families are working 18 hour days and they're getting robbed sometimes repeatedly and they're standing behind the counter, okay? And black customers who are getting followed and watched and treated like suspects in their own neighborhood are standing in front of it. And my honest opinion is that both of these people are exhausted, okay? And both of them are scared. And nobody built that arrangement on purpose, but everybody is living inside of it. And I just I just have compassion because I think that's a I think that's a A powder keg. Nobody in that store on March sixteenth invented it, but it is the room they were both standing in. You get what I'm saying? And the woman behind the corner, the counter, that morning was soon ja du. She was fifty one. She was the owner's wife. And by her own testimony, she normally didn't even work this store. She typically apparently worked the family's other location up in Santa Clarita. So the tape, now we're back, all right? Let me explain some things, all right? So do decides Latasha Was stealing, right? Later on, she said it was because of how the juice was sitting in her backpack. Do grabs her by the sweater and pulls her towards the counter, right? Remember, I told y'all Latasha had to hit her twice to get a loose, get loose. I wanted that plainly, because it is a fact that the defense would build everything on later on. But I don't think that a fifteen year old girl getting yanked backwards by a stranger and swinging to get free is a mystery that requires explaining. I would highly approve of my daughter needing to do that, okay? That is defending yourself. Get your hands off the child. So do falls behind the counter, right? At some point I told y'all she she she threw a stool. And then Latasha, she picks up the orange juice and she puts it on the counter. She put it down. She was leaving. So do comes up within comes up with the 38, right? Latasha turns around and then do shoots her in the back of the head from about three feet. And then two days later, on Monday, March 18th, LAPD Commander Michael Bostick, he stands in front of the reporters and he lets everybody know what the tape shows. That there was no attempt at shoplifting. There was no robbery. There was no crime at all. And that's the police saying that ain't the family or an activist or a hashtag if there were one at the back in the day. It was the police. And there were two children up in that store. Lakeisha Combs, she was thirteen. And Ollie, he was nine. Both of them said that Latasha she just wanted to walk up to the counter with the money in her hand and that she intended to pay. A nine year old girl had to get up on the witness stand and say that, by the way. I have a problem with that. But anyway, let's move on. So the charge comes back murder. And the conviction, it comes back voluntary manslaughter. And the whole case lives in the gap between those two worlds. So I'm gonna build it. because I think that if I built this properly that it The rest of the cases will make just a lot more sense because it makes a lot of sense to okay? So murder in California is an unlawful killing with malice after thought. I think I pronounced that wrong. Anyway, malice does not mean that you hate other person. It's a legal term. Expressed malice is an intent to kill. Implied malice is doing something dangerous to human life with a conscious disregard for it. And voluntary manslaughter is an unlawful killing where you did intend to kill, but the law takes the malice away because of the circumstances. And there are two main ways that this occurs. One, I'm pretty sure we're all so familiar with the term of heat of passion. The idea is that a person is provoked badly enough that an ordinary, reasonable person would have reacted from emotion instead of judgment, and that there was no cooling off period. This is not a defense. It doesn't get you out, it just reduces your murder to manslaughter. I think we're all familiar. The second concept is imperfect self-defense. And honestly, this is actually like like favorite pieces of criminal law, I'm not gonna lie, and something I really kind of think about a lot, even before I actually like well the actual factual term for it. But it means you actually actually genuinely believed you were in danger, the imperfect self-defense. But your belief was unreasonable. So you you don't get self-defense because self-defense requires the belief to be reasonable. But you don't get murder either because you're not acting with malice, you're acting in fear. Unreasonable fear is still fear. I think that's what I think is interesting about it. And that's the whole doctrine for it, right? But now here's where. If I like just wanted to play pretend. Well, we have fake lawyer. She's not a real lawyer. She cannot she cannot be a real lawyer. Because girl, she looked at them the the LSAT thing and I said, What is this? I'm so confused. But I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna figure it out. Okay? Anyway, If I were a prosecutor, okay. I just kinda wanna walk you through like This, because this is the exact learning I'm thinking I'm trying to learn. Okay. But heat of passion has two requirements. And until I like looked more into it, I feel like I only remembered the first one really. And I feel like a lot of people may be the same. Okay. Anyway, so the first is that the provocation has to be enough that an ordinary reasonable person would act from passion rather than judgment. Not this particular person, right? A reasonable one. The law doesn't care if you someone who's like unusually jumpy. But there's a second part that gets skipped. There cannot have been a cooling off period. If enough time has passed between the provocation and the killing that a reasonable person would have cooled down, the heat's gone, and now you're back to a murder charge. So let's let's run that tape right back through a little bit with that second requirement in your hand, right? Do grabs her. Latasha swings to get free. Do falls. Dude throws a stool. Latasha puts the juice on the counter. Latasha turns around. Latasha starts walking out. And only then does Dew reach under the counter, get a gun, bring it up, point it, and fire. What I'm saying is every single one of those, as I see it, is a separate action, right? And every separate action is a moment where a person is doing something, which means every one of them is a moment where a person could have stopped. And the moment she pulled that trigger, the girl was walking away from her. I saw I get pissed. This case one that pisses me off. Sorry guys. Woo-sa, is that what they say? Is that what the girls say? I'ma try. Woo! Okay. Whatever the provocation was, Miss Soon Doo ja, it was over. It had literally turned his back and left. That is the murder argument, and I think it's a real one, but the jury. The jury did not take it. And I'm not saying that they were stupid. I was not in that room. I didn't hear the testimony. But You have to wonder how a defense turns to an intentional shooting into manslaughter. That gap right there is where they kinda got through. So I'm gonna calm down. September thirtieth, nineteen ninety one. That's where we're at right now, okay? Six and a half months after she dies. Soon Jadu goes on trial for murder in the Los Angeles County Supre Superior Court in the Compton Courthouse in front of a judge named Joyce Carlin. Keep that name in your mind. She's been a judge for about 10 months. Before that, she was a federal prosecutor. And this is one of the first serious cases she's ever handled from the bench. but I do want you like just hold her name in your mouth, okay, because she's gonna become the whole story about forced scenes, okay, okay. But not yet, not yet. Right now, she's just the judge, and the prosecution is standing up, and the prosecution has a tape. So the case the state put on was short, because it didn't need to be long. They played the surveillance tape. Then they put the two children on the stand. I was I still have feelings about that. But then they put up a ballistics expert. And that was most of it, right? And I wanna say something about how rare that is in 1991. Because prosecutors usually have to build a killing out of memory, out of people who were scared and only saw part of it, out of a corner. here, however, they could just hit play and let twelve people watch a woman shoot a child in the back of the head from three feet away. That's not only the whole ball game. The defense didn't argue that it didn't happen. You can't argue it didn't happen. There's a tape. So the defense argued about her head. They said this is a woman who was terrified. Her family store had been robbed and robbed and robbed and her son had been threatened. And she believed that she was going to be attacked by a gang member. And she was 51 years old and small. And she thought she was fighting for her life in her own store. And then the defense made a second argument. And this is the one that I'm actually going to slow all the way down for because This is the argument that actually did the work. They said the gun went off. Okay, so the revolver Soon Jadu fired was a 38. I don't really know much about guns, but I can see it's not a gun the family bought clean off of a shelf. Okay? The gun had been stolen out of the family store in 1988. Police recovered it. Police gave it back, and somewhere in between. Someone did some alterations on it and worked on it. And the LAPD ballistas experts, a man named David Butler, testified about what the work did. And the gun had been altered. So excuse me, the trigger pull took noticeably less pressure than it should have. The safety mechanism was not functioning apparently the way it was supposed to. So the defense version was basically that she pointed it and the thing was a hair trigger and it fired before she decided anything. So Do testifies and she testifies that she didn't know the gun had been altered. She said she did not really even know how to use it at all. I think when you really like see what the testimony is reaching for, I think legally is reaching for the space underneath voluntary manslaughter, if you get what I'm saying. Because if she pointed a gun to the girl's head and chose to pull the trigger, you are somewhere in killing, right? But if the gun fired because the gun's broken, well, now aren't you kind of arguing about an accident with a deadly weapon? Which is a completely different animal and a much shorter sentence. That's just kind of the whole fight in this trial, I think. Not whether she shot her. Whether she meant it. And so then the two children get on the stand, which I'ma keep saying I Lakeisha. Was thirteen years old. Allie was nine. They were in that store. Gosh, I feel so bad for them. Like I'm gonna be so real, so f so for real with y'all. Like she like she like she she really reminds me of like Someone like a care about like a friend, like she like she really does. Like just like friends all the like the younger kids, takes care of them, makes sure they get home. Like those kids were in the store with her, you know what I'm saying? Like they were the neighborhood kids, like she was like looking after, like them calling her Gizmo. Like she just seemed like such a light. And like for this lady to like take away the like that light in fr like in front of the kid like you know what I'm saying like it just it's just it's just like it makes me feel the type of way okay and it's visceral and it's like a little hard to talk about but like we're gonna talk about it and I'm gonna put my big girl pants on and talk about it, okay? 'Cause it's happened to real people. so they both testify that she was turning away, that she put the orange juice down, that she was leaving. A nine year old had to sit in a courtroom in front of a judge and a jury and a defendant and say out loud what they watched happen to a girl. They saw get shot in the head in a store. They walked into all the time. And I just also feel like nobody ever talks about those two kids. So which is I guess why I'm spending little bit of time talking about them today. So Friday, October eleventh, nineteen ninety one. This is eleven days after it started, right? The jury comes back and they do not say murdered. They say Voluntary manslaughter. Now Let's talk about the second half of the verdict really quick. It was a it was easy it was actually hard for me to like really get this information, some of this information. But from what I can see, the jury f also found a true a sentencing enhancement for personal use of a firearm. And that's penal code twelve thousand twenty two point five. Which is the add-on for when you're not just convicted of the crime, you personally use the gun in the crime. And the voluntary manslaughter is penal code 192 subsection A one ninety-two A. But here's why these findings together are pretty loud, right? Because voluntary manslaughter is not an accident charge. I said that earlier, right? Voluntary manslaughter is an intentional killing that the law gives you. Kind of like a discount on and the firearm enhancement means the jury decided she personally used the gun. So like when you put it together, the jury, they hear the hair trigger defense, and the jury hears the ballistics experts, and the jury hears her say she didn't know how the gun worked, and the jury didn't buy it. They came back with a verdict that said no, she intended to kill her and that she personally used a gun to do it. They f just found that she did it in the heat of moment instead of coldly. That's the discount. That's all the discount is. So Here's another thought that I want to kind of correct out there. Is that I've seen it say that the jury recommended 16 years, but the jury didn't didn't recommend anything. Juries in California, from what I can see, they don't sentence people. That's not a thing. Or any place. I don't really I don't think. Right, guys? I'm not a lawyer. So that's what I'm saying, right, guys? From what I know, a jury decides facts, guilty or not guilty, and whether the enhancements are true, then they go home. But the judge is the one that sentences. Where sixteen comes from is the math because voluntary manslaughter in nineteen ninety one carried three, six, or eleven years and the gun enhancement could add up to five more. So eleven plus five is sixteen. So sixteen years is the ceiling. It's the most that Joyce Carlin was ever allowed to give her. It was never a number that twelve jurors could have asked for. And I just want to be clear on that actually be before I talk about the next thing. Because the next thing I'm gonna be talking about soon is about The one person I feel like in this story whose entire job was to look at Soon Jiu's life and tell the judge what she deserved. But that person is not a protester and they're not the family. The person worked for the county and that person said prison. Okay? We better talk about it. So, first off about the verdict. The verdict is in, right? Remember? But now there's a gap. There's five weeks between the verdict and the sentencing. And during that gap. There's something that happens that's not very much heard of, but I want you to know what it is because it's the going to be the thing that proves what happened next was a choice and not a rule. In between a conviction and a sentencing, somebody investigates the defendant. And it is called a pre-sentence investigation. And it includes a probation report. And I gotta be a little careful here because the name is kind of confusing because a probation report is not report It's not a report recommending probation. It's a report written by the probation department and it can recommend anything, including prison. and here is what it is. The court orders the county probation department to go look into the person who just got convicted, right? So then a probation officer interviews the defendant. They pull up their criminal history, they look at their work, their family, their health, they look at the facts of the crime. there's a channel called Man Do, M-A-N-D-O-O, I think. And he has a lot of different hearings like this. He has parole hearings, revocation hearings where people could possibly get their parole revoked and the board that listens to the people who plead and like probation officers weigh in. So i it's very interesting if you ever wanna know more about it or see more of it like in real life. ever since like you know, the C V nineteen stuff happened. they a lot of some some s states moved to virtual. And that included YouTube. So like victims could also speak at these some of these hearings as well and put their two cents in as well, or people who support them and stuff like that. But anyway, so they look at the facts of the crime and they often will talk to the victim's family and then the officer will write up all of it and end the document with the recommendation to the judge. Now, the reason why it matters so much is because their probation officer is the one person in this whole thing who's not on a side. The prosecutor, right, they want the most. The defense attorney, they want the least. That's their job. That is the design. Nobody's being sneaky, but the probation officer works for the county, not for either table. And their entire assignment is to look at the human being and tell the court what this case actually calls for. And the judges don't have to follow it. That should be clear. A probation report is a recommendation. It's not an order. But it's the closest thing a sentencing has to a natural read. And in the matter of Soon Ja Doo, the probation report recommended state prison. That's it. That's the sentence I just want you to sit in for a second. Because the neutral professional, the county employee who has no dog in the fight, who had Dew's whole life in front of her, who knew Du was 51 with no record, who knew about the robberies and the store and the sun and the fear, looked all of it, looked at it all up and down, sideways, did a crossword puzzle with it. Sedoku, Mahjong, I don't even know how you could do that with it. But they did it all with it, right? And they said she should go to prison. And I want to be honest about what that report was weighing because it wasn't not weighing nothing. Sorry for the double negative. I think it was. Do genuinely had no criminal history. She was genuinely older. Her family store had genuinely been robbed. Her son genuinely had been threatened. Those are real facts, and the report actually had it. And the report still said. P R I S O N for you. Because whatever Sunja do was afraid of in general, she was not in danger in that specific four seconds. The girl put the juice down. She was walking out. And a gun behind a counter does not turn, shooting a child. I'ma keep saying it. I'ma say it. I'ma say it. I'ma say C H I L D. That's what she was. A child. She wasn't a growing. She was a child. My daughter's fourth birthday is today, okay? And in three years she will still be my child and a child. Play with if you want to. So A gun behind a counter does not turn shooting a child in the back of the head into something a sentence can shrug at. And the prosecution was not asking for anything soft either, okay? The deputy district attorney on this case was Roxanne. Can I pronounce the last name? And she asked for the maximum. 16 years, the ceiling, the most the law allowed. So let's go count the room, okay? Twelve jurors said she intended to kill Latasha Harlands and personally used the gun to do it. And the prosecutor said sixteen years. The probation department, the neutral one, the one with no side, said prison. And every single person with a professional role in that courtroom, except the defense attorney, was pointing in the same direction. And then on November 15th, 1991, Soon Jadu walked into the court for sentencing, and she walked back about that courthouse and went home. This next one part's gonna be rough 'cause this next part we'll be talking about is a scene that broke LA. Friday, November 15th, 1991, we're in the Compton Courthouse. Latasha's family's in that room. Her grandmother Ruth. Her aunt Denise Harlan, who by this point has become the person carrying this entire case on her back in public. Her little sister and her little brother are children and they're living through this. And they sat through the tape, y'all. They've sat through this. They set through the defense saying the gun just went off. They've sat through five weeks of waiting. And they know the probation department said prison. And they know the prosecutor acts for 16 years. So they're sitting there. doing what any of us would be doing, which is bracing for a number. And Judge Joyce Carlin sentenced Soon Jadu to ten years in state prison. And then she suspends it. Five years of probation, four hundred hours of community service, a five hundred dollar fine plus restitution to the Harlan's family for her funeral medical costs. No prison, no jail. Jude had been out on bail the entire time and she walked out of that courthouse the same exact way she walked in. Ain't I ain't even gonna let it I ain't I ain't even gonna let I ain't gonna let it get me let me get my back. You know, I'm gonna mm go on the next slide, okay. And let's talk about the word suspended, okay? Because I think the word suspended does a little something sneaky to your ear. So when a judge imposes a sentence and it suspends it, the sentence legally exists on paper. She got ten years. It's written down, it is real. It just never starts. What a suspended sentence actually is, it's kind of a threat. It means The 10 years is sitting there in a drawer. And if you violate your probation, that judge can pull it out and make you serve that thing, okay? And if you do not violate it, it can stay in that drawer forever and then it can go away. So every headline that said she got 10 years was technically accurate and completely meaningless. She served zero. And I want to stay on the $500 fine for one more second because that number, it I don't like it. It haunts me a little bit. $500 to the state. Let me say that again. $500 to the state, not to the family. The family got funeral expenses, which means the legal consequence attached to killing Latasha Harlands included reimbursing the people who had to bury her for the cost of burying her, right? That's not a punishment. I think that's a receipt, if you if you ask me. but let's let's get to the reasoning, okay? Because she she explained herself on the record, and I want you to hear what she actually said instead of what a caption may say that she said, okay? So her reasoning had a few pieces, pieces, right? Had little, it had a few pieces to it. Dew had no criminal record. Dew was not. In the judge's view, someone who would go out and hurt anyone else. So prison would not be protecting the public from her. And the judge also leaned hard on the altered gun. She took the position that this woman would not have fired if the weapon had not been tampered with. I really, really have a problem with that. Really have a problem with that. I really have a problem with that. Because it wouldn't matter that the gun was tampered with if she ain't never put it in her hand. Because last time I checked she was already leaving. So there was no point to touch a gun. So the judge set the part that is still being argued 35 years later, which is Dew's reaction. Then the judge asks in her words, was the reaction understandable? And the judge said, I think that it was. Understandable. I wanna be fair to that word because I think it's a word that could be flattened, okay? And I sorry, my brain just thinks a lot. And I kind of thought a lot, okay. In a courtroom, understandable is not the same as okay, right? The judge was not saying it was fine. She just called the reaction inappropriate in the same breath. But here's what I think understandable does in a sentencing. I think understandable is the word you use when you're explaining why someone gets less. And that is where the whole country's stomach dropped because a judge looked at four seconds of a 15-year-old girl walking away with her back turned and found the shooting of her understandable. Enough to not require a single day in custody. Now I do have to give you the law because this is the part that decides whether what the judge did was a glitch or a door. Okay? So from what I can understand in California, there's a statute that says probation is presumptively off the table for certain people. It is penal code 1203 subsection E, paragraph two. and it says that probation shall not be granted to somebody who personally used a deadly weapon in the commission of the crime, except in unusual cases. Where the interests of justice would best be served. So shall not be granted except in unusual cases. So there was a presumption against exactly what the judge did. The jury had already found that Du personally used a firearm, right? And that finding walked her right into 1203E2, which Means to get probation, the judge had to make a finding on the record that this was an unusual case where the interest of justice would be best served by not sending her to prison. And there are actual written criteria for that. California had a rule of court, rule 413, laying out what makes a case unusual enough to overcome the presumption. And rule 414 listing the things the judge weighs on, whether probation fits at all. The circumstances of the crime, the vulnerability of the victim, whether the defendant was armed, remorse, the likelihood of doing it again. See those criteria exist so that unusual doesn't just mean, I feel like it. So I think the honest version is worse than even a loophole. Cause this wasn't a judge breaking the rules, this was a judge using the door the law deliberately leaves open, in my opinion. The legislator wrote a presumption against probation for armed killers and then wrote an escape hatch into the same sentence for the rare case that calls for mercy. And a judge with 10 months on the bench decided that this was the rare case. Shooting a 15-year-old child in the back of a head over a bottle of orange juice. That was the one that got the escape hatch. And that's just something that can't get past. It's not really that the law failed. I feel like it's like the little law worked exactly as is written in the discretion. Instead, inside of it got handed to a person and the person used it this way. And listen, let me tell y'all something. The courtroom ain't taken quietly, neither did the family. Denise Carlins walked out that building and spent years of her life on this. And I'm be coming back to her and giving her her flowers to talk about what she did for She ain't play. She wasn't playing around with her family. But before I get to what Salic Centro did with this sentence, I wanna clean a little something up because This case is like really one of the most misremembered cases in America, honestly. Like low key. I mean I guess I don't even know people that know about it. But I feel like if you have happened to saunter past it a little bit. It I actually the reason why I came here to kinda talk about the case, 'cause there's like s a post that I don't know, I don't know what viral means anymore these days. Like I don't know what that really technically means. But someone's like you just have like a lot of stuff, like a lot of like likes or whatever. I think. And it was talking about this case and I was like, yeah But like I was reading some stuff and I was like some of the stuff is all right. And I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm gonna just I'm gonna talk about local, okay? Listen, I don't think anyone's dumb for believing a caption, okay? I believe captions. And sometimes it's because when a case I feel like gets famous for being outrageous, sometimes people can start improving it maybe in their eyes, or maybe they add a detail that may make something hit a little harder. And then sometimes I feel like the fake detail can become the thing a lot of people can argue about and then the real case may end up walking away unexamined. So there's just a few things. Like I said, for one, the jury did not recommend sixteen years. Already gave you this one. Juries in California don't sentence. I don't think they have a dude. I don't think I've heard that before. Really, all the time. Maybe I don't know. 16 was a statutory ceiling, which means it was the most the judge could have given. No juror asked for a number. Two Soon Jadu was not acquitted. I think this is a big one, and it's one I've been seeing consistently. She did not walk out of there not guilty, she was convicted, a felony, voluntary manslaughter with a true finding that she personally used the firearm. The outrage in this case is not an acquittal. The outrage is a conviction with no consequence attached to it. And those are not the same thing. And I think the second one is scarier because an acquittal at least means somebody's not convinced. But this was 12 people being convinced. And it not mattering. Three, the judge was not Korean. Okay. I just want to say that plainly because this rumor has had 35 years to grow and people repeat it. It's this rumor's older than me, okay? And people repeat it like it's the whole explanation, okay? The judge was a white Jewish woman from a Hollywood family. Her father was a film producer. She came to the bench out of the United States attorney's office where she had been a federal prosecutor. I don't know. I feel like s the story sometimes people tell these tell themselves. I don't know that the judge left let her off because they were like the same. I don't think that's what happened. I think what happened is harder. I think a formal federal prosecutor with no connection to the Dew fam Dew family looked at this and decided that it was understandable. Another thing, she was not stealing. That child was not stealing. She had money, two dollars in her hand, in that store for a bottle of orange juice that cost a dollar and seventy-nine. And multiple people in that building said she had the money out she was about to pay. And when Dude grabbed her, Latasha put the juice on the counter and turned to leave. She didn't even walk out with it. The thing that Dude was supposedly stopping was sitting on the counter when the shot was fired. So If you call her a shoplifter, the whole story reorganizes itself around a crime that never happened. And five, she was fifteen, not sixteen. I see sixteen all over the place. She was fifteen. She would have turned sixteen that July. I don't know why. That just bothers me, okay? Okay. And but I will give the po I will give the post one thing, okay? The orange juice detail is real. A dollar and seventy nine. People hear it and they assume that someone made it up to just be like poetic. But no, that's Just what it cost. But the only reason why I even bothered on all five of those, because I feel like every single correction honestly makes the case worse, not better. I'm not gonna lie to you. She was convicted, not acquitted. The judge had no tie, shared tie to her. She just decided this. The girl had her money out. The jury found intent and found the gun. And there was a county probation officer in the file saying prison. It's just the myths. They all make this story a broken thing. about like one broken thing, right? But I think the truth makes it a story about a system working start to finish all the way through a conviction and still producing nothing. And there are two more places that a system got a chance to do something. The Court of Appeal and the federal government. Let me tell you what both of them did. Okay? Let's talk about it. We're gonna talk about it, okay. I love y'all being here with me, okay. The District Attorney Of LA County at the time was a man named Ira Reyner. And his office, they were not about to let this go. They challenged the sentence. And the way you challenge a sentence like that, it's not a regular appeal of conviction because the conviction is not the problem. The conviction was fine. The problem was the thing that the judge did afterwards. So the DA, they go up with what I can what I see is called I'm I I'm doing my research, y'all, and I'm I'm hoping I'm getting stuff right. A writ of mandate. Which from what I can understand is the move you make when you're wanting a higher court to tell a lower court it got up outside his lane and needed to go do it again. And so the case is called People versus Superior Court do. Five California appellate fourth eight twenty two. And I want you to understand what the appeal was actually asking because it's not the question I think you would want it to be looking at. Okay. So the court appeal was not Inquired, was the sentence right? The court appeal, they wanted to know, did judge abuse her discretion? And those are two completely different questions. And the difference is where the case dies. Because abuse of discretion, it governs almost everything a trial judge does. When the law hands a judge a choice and appellate court does not get to make that choice over again, they they're not a do-over. They don't sit there and just like, okay, I would have given her six years. That's not their job. Their job is to their only job is really to see if whether the choice the judge made fell outside the bounds of reason, whether it was arbitrary basically, whether no reasonable judge could have landed there on this record. So the bar is not, was this a good call? The bar was was this call so far gone that we are going to override a judge who was in the room. And a duh on purpose, that's a really freaking high bar, you guys. So, as we're not surprised, in April 1992, the Court of Appeal ruled they ruled, they affirmed the judge's sentence stood. And the opinion was not a love letter. The court went through it carefully. They walked through the presumption against probation. They walked through what the record showed, and they still came out to the other side, and they were just like, this was within her discretion to do, y'all. But I want you to hear the thing underneath that because This is the part I'm wanting y'all to carry about this episode, okay? Affirmed, hear me y'all, does not mean right. Affirmed means loud, okay? An appellate court saying a sentence was not an abuse of discretion. It's not an appellate court saying the sentence was just. It's an appellate court saying the law gave one person the power to decide this, and the person decided it, and we're not taking that power back. So at the point, this point, basically the system, they had to tell the Harlan family two separate things. The trial court tells them that this was understandable and the appellate court basically is telling them that this was permissible. Nobody's telling them that it was wrong. So the DA office, they win millin, man. They keep fighting their way in the only other way it could, which is to stop sending her cases. Prosecutors actually started using their challenges to keep that judge off of criminal matters. They were basically rerouting around her. And there was a recall campaign against her too. But it didn't work. She stayed on the bench and she was on it for years. And then the last door we're gonna talk about for this. Why the federal government didn't do anything. Because I think this is a very valid question that I saw in some discussions we're talking about this case and some other cases I was researching to related. I think y'all is anybody in here like Like does your kind like you guys know. Like you re you research one can and at least another, and at least another, at least another, at least another. So but I saw this question they brought up for something else, so it may not be outrelevant, but like we think about the Rodney King officers, right? The state acquitted four of them and then the federal government turned around and charged two of them and convicted them. Everybody remembers that. So that's why the feds can come in on one and not the other. Is called the color of law. So the statue that got used on those officers is Title 18, United States Code, Section 242. Yeah, 18 USC 242. I'm saying it right. I'm just trying to make double check my work, okay? But what criminalizes is someone who, acting under color of law, willfully deprives a person of their constitutional rights. And under color of law, that means that you're using the power of the state, like a badge or uniform, government authority in your hand. And so that's the hook. And the hook needs a government actor on the end of it. And Soon Jadu is a store owner. She was a private citizen behind a counter. There's no badge or state power or color of law. So the exact statute that reached those officers would not be one that to reach her. and the obstacle is not really the obstacle because the federal government absolutely can prosecute somebody after a state already did. It's called dual sovereignty. The state and the federal government are treated as two separate sovereigns. So a state case and a federal case over the same conduct are not double jeopardy, which is exactly how the king officers got tried twice. So it's not that the feds were blocked by her state conviction. It is that in nineteen ninety one, for a private shopkeeper shooting a black customer, there's just no federal statute sitting there that's gonna like fit anything cleanly enough for the Justice Department to bring it. So I saw some people like why why didn't the feds find something to get on her that that it's not It just doesn't work. The tool existed for the cops. It it's not one that would exist for her. So now we're done. Every door's closed, y'all. The jury convicted her. They found the gun. The probation department said prison. The judge says probation. The court of appeal says that it's allowed. The federal government there's another for them. The sentence was final. The case was over. And in the same month that the Court of Appeal signed off on it, a jury in Simi Valley was about to come back on four police officers. This is a long one, ain't it? So on April twenty first, nineteen ninety two, the Court of Appeals, they signed off on Soon Ja Doo's probation, and eight days later, Los Angeles burned. April 29th, 1992. So Wednesday, not a Thursday. A courthouse of Semi-Valley, which is about 40 miles. Also, Thursdays are my favorite days of the week, by the way. I meant to say that. but a courthouse of Semi-Valley, which is about 40 miles from where Rodney King was beaten, and is a completely different world from it, basically. The jury comes back on the four officers. Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. And on the last one, they could not agree on one count against Officer Powell and it hung. And that's the tape I told you about earlier. The 56 baton strikes, 81 seconds, thir twenty-three officers standing in the intersection on video, on the news, in everybody's living room for 13 months, and the verdict was not guilty. So by the afternoon it started, Florence in Normandy, South Central, and then it was everywhere. And it went for six days. And I wanna say something about the word people use for it, right? Riot, uprising, rebellion. People fight about which word. And I got Understand why, but I want to tell you what happened, and I want you to just let hold whatever fit up in your mouth. You know what I'm saying? Okay, that sounded weird. We y'all get what I'm saying. Sorry. That sounded weird, really, really appropriate, sorry. But around 63 people died, right? And more than 2,000 were injured. Thousands were arrested. The property damage ran to roughly a billion dollars. The National Guard came in, then federal troops in an American city. And here's kind of the part that the Rodney King framing leaves out. But Latasha Harlands was in it. Her names was on the walls in chant. People in that city were not only answering for four officers acquitted that week, they were answering for a girl who had been dead 13 months with a conviction on the books and nobody serving a day. If you only tell people about Rodney King, you only telling them half. The beating said the state will not punish police who hurt you. And the due sentence said the state will not punish anybody who kills your child up in a store. And I think together those things said something very specific that your life is not worth custody. So Here's where I have to do both things. And I'm gonna do both of them for real. Because y'all know how I am. The rage was earned. I ain't gonna sit there and be careful. Be the careful voice about it. I ain't gonna do it. A city watched a videotape of a child being shot and watched the law, call it understandable, and then watch the higher call court call that fine. There ain't no version of being a reasonable person where you watch that and you don't feel nothing. None. You're a psychopath if you if you don't. The anger was not a malfunction, the anger was the correct response to information. And Korean American families who had absolutely nothing to do with Sunja do lost everything they had. Something like twenty three hundred Korean owned businesses that were damaged and or destroyed. Korean American merchants took an estimated four hundred million dollars in losses, which was close to half all the damage in the entire city. Families who had been in this country a few years, who had put up every dollar they had into one store, they watched it go. And Koreatown was essentially left on its own. Police were pulled to other places. Store owners were ending up on their own roofs with their own guns because nobody was coming. And in Korean American memory, this has a name. Sagou. And I hope I said that right, respectfully. 429. April 29th. In his own grief with his own anniversary, and most people outside that community have never heard the word. I didn't know it. But now here. Here is where both of those things are true at once. And I want you to resist the thing your brain wants to do, maybe which is pig, because that's what my brain wants to do. But the frame everybody got handed in 1992 was black people versus Korean people, two communities at each other's throat. That frame was on every news broadcast, and it was convenient for everybody who was not in either community. And when you ask the question underneath it instead, why wasn't Korean immigrant family running the only store on that corner? Why there's no grocery store? Why did banks lend for liquor stores in that neighborhood and not for much else? Who decided which blocks got invested in and which blocks got liquor licenses? Who decided which neighborhoods got police protection on April 29th and which ones got left? Neither of those two communities wrote any of that. They both inherited it and then they got put into a room together and blamed for the room. And I hope I pronounced that properly and correctly. Sagu. And if I didn't, correct me and I honor the correction honestly. 'Cause I wanna get stuff right on here. But The store where it started, Empire Liquor, it never reopened. It had been closed since the shooting. The community would not have it back, and the family did not bring it back. That corner at Figaroa and 91st just had a dead building on it. So nobody won. Not one person in this entire story won. A 15-year-old is dead. Her family got a funeral in a receipt. The woman who shot her lived under conviction and lost her store and her life in that city. And a judge spent the rest of her career answering for one Friday. Korean immigrant families lost businesses they had not finished paying for. And a neighborhood lost six days and sixty-three people and the few stores it had. And all of that came out of four seconds and one sentence hearing. And that is what discretion costs when everybody when it goes the wrong way. People talk about judicial discretion like it's a technicality, like it was paperwork. It's not paperwork. It's one person in a robe deciding what life was worth and then a city living inside the answer. Soon Jadu finished her probation. Five years, four hundred hours. She did not serve a day in custody for killing Latasha Harlands. And once the case went quiet, she disappeared out of public life entirely. The family left that part. of Los Angeles. The store stayed closed and she's a convicted felon who never even went to jail. And that is the whole ending of her part of this. Joyce the judge Joyce, she kept her job. There was a recall campaign against her and it didn't succeed. She won her election. Prosecutors spent years steering cases away from her and and eventually she was off criminal work and over in family and juvenile matters and then she left the bitch in her nineties. And then she went to local politics. She's on the city council, Manhattan Beach. She served as a mayor of that city. So the person who made the decision at the center of it all went on to have a completely ordinary, successful life about twenty miles from where she died. But Denise Harlan's, I said I was gonna come back to her, she did not get to go back to ordinary. Her aunt spent the rest of her life on this. She built an organization around it. The Latasha Harlan's Justice Committee and she organized and she showed up and she kept saying the name in rooms where people had moved on and she still doing it decades later. And then she died in 2018. And that's what it actually looks like when a family doesn't get justice. It's not a montage. It's one woman giving up her entire adult life to be the reason somebody still remembers her niece. And then there's a part of this that I wanna just say, 'cause I had to put put it down at So she was buried at a cemetery called Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs. And a few years later it came out that the cemetery was a scandal. Operators who had been disturbing graves and reselling plots, thousands of people's remains were disturbed and the records were a disaster. Which meant her family could not reliably say where she was. She was killed at fifteen. Her killer never went to jail. And then even the grave did not stay hers. So who kept her? Tupac did. He put her name in his work on purpose and he dedicated a whole song to her. You gotta keep your head up. I'm not gonna sing it. Ooh, child, things are gonna get easier. That song dedicated to her. And because of that, a whole generation of people who never read a word about this case, you still knew that there was a girl named Latasha. And I'm not gonna pretend that that's the same as justice, because it's not. But when the courts give a family nothing, the people who keep a name alive are the artists and the aunties every time. And a historian named Brenda Stevenson, she wrote the book on this, a real one, with the trial record in it. The reason I can tell you where the probation report, like what it said and what the blistency experts said, and what happened in that courtroom on a Friday in 1991 is that somebody did the work of keeping the file. And I'm gonna make sure I put her in the sources because I don't wanna stand here and act like I found this all up by myself. I didn't. And now the last boast things, because it's a very uncomfortable one. The outrage at this sentence was completely legitimate, and people who study this period will tell you that the public fury about judges being too soft in California in the early nineties helped build the political appetite for mandatory sentencing. The street three strikes, longer terms, less discretion. And You know who those laws went on to swallow. So one honest way I think to read this is that a judge's mercy for a woman who shot a black child helped fuel a sentencing crackdown that then landed hardest on black people. And that's not a neat lesson. I don't have a bow for that. The fix for a judge having too much discretion turned out to be taking discretion away from all judges, and that didn't go where anybody hoped either. So that's the case, that's the record. That's everyone's kinda just like landing spot. But not to tell you that this part is mine, 'cause I've kind of been holding it the entire episode. And then we're done. I told you in scene two that Latasha Harland wanted to be a lawyer. And I didn't put that in as a sad detail. I put it in because I have been sitting with it like forever just thinking about it, I don't know. I'm going back to school right now for it, right now. And that's the whole reason this show sounds, I feel like the way it does. With me stopping every ten minutes to like tell you what malice means and what probation report is and what abuse of discretion does. I'm not performing legal knowledge at you. I'm actually just learning it out loud and bringing it with me. And this entire episode is the story of a fifteen year old who wanted the exact thing I'm doing. And the machine she wanted to go work inside is a machine that decided her death was understandable. And I just kinda keep thinking about what kind of lawyer she would have been. I don't know, because like a girl who was raised by her grandmother, who buried her mother at ten, who carried her little brother and her little sister, and who was on honor roll. I wasn't on honor roll, she was on honor roll. She She doesn't get to grow up to be a lawyer who's in it for the suit. You get what I'm saying? She would have been in a courtroom in Compton. I know she would have been. She would have been right there, standing up there at a sentence with a probation report in her own hand, saying, like, Your Honor, look, look at what the department recommended. And I think she would have been so good. She would have been like the best EA. And we don't get her. And the reason we don't get her is because of a a bottle of orange juice that she had the money for. And I wanna be honest about the other reason this case gets me. I know what it is to be a young black girl in a body that people decide things about before you open your mouth. She was 15 and 5 foot something, and someone looked at her and saw a threat worth a gun. That's not a story from 1991. Girls get read like that today at school, at work, at in a store by people who was were up and down. They ain't doing it. And I know what it is to be a girl carrying more at home than someone your age probably should be carrying. It's still showing up with your homework done and she was doing that at fifteen with her mother in the ground. Mine's live. Hers and she did that. So when I say see her, I'm not being cute. I see her. Now here's the part I'm gonna leave you with, and this is the part that I I'm gonna be taking for the rest my life. Everything in this case was legal. The charge, the verdict, probation under twelve three E two, I think I got that right, was legal because the statute built the expectation. The appellate court saying This was within her discretion was legal. The federal government declining was legal. There's no villain hiding in a loophole. The law did this with the lights on, y'all. Which means the lesson is not that we need better rules. We had rules. There was a presumption against probation for armed killers, and it got overcome in one afternoon. The lesson is that discretion is a person. Every single place the law says a judge may or the court shall consider, or in unusual cases, somebody's whole life. is sitting in human being's hand and it comes out however the human being sees you. And the judge looked at a fifty one year old store owner and saw someone understandable. And she looked at the same four seconds the rest of us looked at and didn't see a child walking away. And that's not a drafting problem. That is a who is in the chair problem. So that's why I'm doing this. Not because I think one lawyer can fix it. I don't. I don't even know if I can be one. But every one of those discretionary moments is going to belong to somebody. And I'd rather it belong to people who have sat with this case and know what it cost when it goes the wrong way. She wants to be in that chair. I'm gonna go get in. So let me do the thing this show is named after, and then we'll really be done. Soon Jadu was generally afraid. Her family store had generally been robbed. Her son had generally been threatened, and none of that was happening in the four seconds when a fifteen year old put a bottle of orange juice on the counter and turned around to walk out. Both things are true. The gun had generally been altered. The trigger did not genuinely take less pressure than it should have, and twelve people heard that entire defense and still found that she intended to kill her and personally use the gun. Hope things are true. Joyce Carlin had the legal authority to do exactly what she did, and what she did set on top of a conviction, a firearm finding, a statutory presumption against probation, and a county probation officer saying prison. Both things are true. The Court of Appeal was correctly applying the abuse of discretion of standard, and that standard is the reason a sentence everybody in the state was screaming about got to stand. They're all true. The rage in LA in April nineteen ninety two was earned, and it was about Latasha as much as it was about Rodney King and Korean immigrant families who had never met Soon Ja do lost businesses that they had bled for, and they have their own names for that week. And they're still grieving it. It's all true. And There is something that is not both things, okay? There is something that is just one thing. A 15 year old girl walked into a store with $2 in her hand for a bottle of orange juice that cost $1.79 and was shot in the back of the head. And nobody served a single day. There's no other side of that. I look, there ain't one. Her name was Latasha Harlan. She was 15 years old. She died on March 16th, 1991. She was on the honor roll. She played on the drill team. She looked after her little brother and her little sister. And she buried her mother at 10 and she wanted to be a lawyer. And Lakeisha Combs was 13, and Allie was nine. And they had to watch it and then get up in a courtroom and tell it. Their names are important too, and Denise Harlands gave her entire life to making sure you would hear this. She's the reason this episode exists. Say hers as well. And that is Latasha Harlan's, that is Soon Jaju, that is Joyce Carlin, that is what, twelve three E two? An abuse of discretion and a five hundred dollar fine. And I appreciate everyone for sitting through this very, very hard episode. And now hopefully they did not sing happy birthday to my daughter without me.