For the last seven years, Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. Court
For the last seven years, Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has also been writing historic reenactments of Asian American trials. (Of more than 180 federal appellate court judges nationwide, Chin is one of just four Asian Americans.) The newest one, titled 22 Lewd Chinese Women, will premiere at the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association’s national convention in Kansas City this November.
It all began with The Trial of Ethel Rosenberg. In 2006, Judge Chin recruited some members of the Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) to reenact the 1951 espionage trial before an annual conference of lawyers. Since then, Judge Chin; his wife, Kathy Hirata Chin, a partner at Cadwalader; and a core group from AABANY have produced a one-hour trial reenactment every year. They’ve focused on cases involving Asian Americans, starting with The Trial of Minoru Yasui, which challenged the legality of FDR’s World War II curfew order for people of Japanese ancestry. Their reenactments have included the Depression-era Massie cases, involving an “honor killing” for the alleged gang-rape of a U.S. naval officer’s wife, and the Tokyo Rose trial of Iva Toguri D’Aquino, who was convicted of treason after World War II and pardoned nearly 30 years later.
To produce a reenactment, the group pulls together excerpts from trial transcripts, testimony, and briefs, along with other original documents. (The Tokyo Rose case involved 6,000 pages.) Chin and his wife write the narration that weaves the excerpts together. Historic photographs, projected via PowerPoint, set the scene.
The reenactments offer a creative way for lawyers to earn Continuing Legal Education credits. But they also raise troubling issues. One reenactment involved the murder of Vincent Chin, an American of Chinese descent (no relation to the judge) who was fatally beaten in 1982 with a baseball bat on the night of his bachelor party. Witnesses recalled that Chin’s murderers had shouted obscenities, blaming Asian Americans like Chin for the layoffs that were ripping through Detroit’s auto industry.
Continue reading about some of the cases they are working on.