Luong v. State of Alabama
The ACLU filed an appeal in the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals challenging the conviction and death sentence of Lam Luong. In this extraordinarily high profile capital case which captivated the Mobile, Alabama, area, the trial judge refused to change the venue to a location outside Mobile, despite a flood of prejudicial, pretrial publicity. Even though all but two jurors on the 155-person panel had heard about the case before their jury duty, the judge refused to allow defense counsel to question jurors individually on their exposure to the publicity. The judge also failed to investigate evidence that several potential jurors had tainted the jury pool by calling for Luong’s execution. The ACLU’s appeal raises these and other challenges to his conviction and death sentence.
Luong was born in Vietnam, where he faced extraordinary discrimination as the son of a black American soldier and a Vietnamese mother. In Vietnam after the war, children of American servicemen were pejoratively called American “remnants” or “dust of sin.” Luong was unable to attend school because of this severe discrimination and was denied residence status in his own community. Luong faced even harsher discrimination because his father was black. Children threw rocks at him and called him a black dog. His stepfather beat him and refused to let him sit at the table. Luong immigrated to the United States from Vietnam as a teenager, as part of a program to grant refugee status to these children.
