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Race divides opinions of Vang verdict

RACE: Some say a white jury can't understand that Chai Soua Vang felt threatened by hunters.

BY LAURA YUEN

ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS

The chilling details of his actions - six dead, four shot in the back - make Chai Soua Vang an unlikely subject of sympathy. But like the O.J. Simpson case, the murder trial that ended Friday night with guilty verdicts on all counts has divided its audience into two camps, largely drawn by racial lines.

In the days leading up to the trial, for example, the case drew dozens of posts filled with raw emotions on the Hmong Today online community forum. Some contributors declared Vang innocent, and at least one deemed him a hero. Another person who identified himself as a hunter of Hmong descent called Vang's actions "outrageous and uncalled for" but said the history of racism in the Northwoods of Wisconsin prompted Vang to believe he needed to "kill or be killed." Phebe Saunders Haugen, a Hamline University law professor, does not doubt that racial overtones led to the bloodshed, a lesson that shouldn't be lost. But the former prosecutor was astonished that Vang was claiming self-defense.

"I have a lot of sympathy for him," said Haugen, who is white. "But shooting eight people, I would have a hard time justifying it as anything other than murder. If it weren't such a rampage... there might have been more sympathy and support from the community."

Haugen's sentiment is a prevailing one: Vang's response was so disproportionate with any kind of verbal abuse he encountered that she can't buy self-preservation as a defense.

Yet some Hmong Americans, as well as blacks and other Minnesotans of color, say they have no trouble putting themselves in Vang's shoes the night he fired at the eight other hunters, who were all white. They make clear that the St. Paul man, who was Hmong American, must pay for his crimes, but they say they understand the fear of feeling outnumbered, threatened and cajoled on account of their race.

Those personal experiences allow them to perceive Vang as not a calculated murderer but a man fueled by instincts of survival.

And they question whether an all-white jury could have shared those same experiences in order to grasp both sides of the story.

"We've all been in that scenario, but it was just lucky for us that we got out without being harmed," said Shoua Lee, 26, who remembered her father, a Hmong immigrant, coming close to fetching his gun after a racially charged incident involving a mob at his front door. "Most people think (Vang) was pushed real hard. It's just very unfortunate that the people who are going to make this decision don't have that background of what it's like to be an outsider, and not only an outsider, but of a different race."

The jury found Vang guilty Friday of murdering six hunters and attempting to murder two others; a third attempted murder charge was added because one of the hunters was pursued twice. Some of the harder facts to digest -- that he chased at least a few of his victims down, even though they weren't armed -- don't diminish Lee's empathy.

"I just believe him when he says they were going to get their guns and come for him," said the St. Paul woman.

The Rev. Devin Miller, a St. Paul church elder and community activist, said he can't help but think that the hunters used racial insults -- and possibly fired the first shot, as Vang contends. That's in dispute with the surviving hunters, who have testified that they didn't use racial slurs and that Vang fired first.

But Vang's statements provide Miller, who is black, with a believable context that would cause a man to snap.

"You can either say, 'This guy's really smart and he's going to play the race card,' or, 'He's telling the truth,' " Miller said. "And I'm thinking, you're in Wisconsin, northern Wisconsin, and here is a group of folks who don't think he should be on their property. I've been in places where maybe not necessarily racial epithets have been said to me, but you get the feeling, 'maybe I shouldn't be here.' I think he was being sincere."

Reactions to the jury selection ranged from outrage to resignation. It wouldn't be a stretch, Miller said, to compare the case to Simpson's civil trial. After a mostly black jury from Los Angeles acquitted Simpson in 1995 in the deaths his wife and her friend, two years later an all-white jury in Santa Monica, Calif., found him civilly accountable.

In Vang's case, the jury selection was held in Madison instead of rural Sawyer County to help ensure an impartial panel.

The original pool of potential jurors included minorities, but none was chosen. Several minorities said they couldn't be impartial.

"That's just how things are," said Shawn Jones, 31, a St. Paul disabled veteran who is black. Last week, before Vang's guilty verdict came down, Jones said, "He ain't gonna have a fair trial."

More troubling, Miller said, is the feeling he gets that the town of Rice Lake has been blindly supporting the hunters, when the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

"The images that come to my mind is that of the rural South in the early '50s and '60s in justifying a lynching," Miller said. "You have the person of color on trial for being in a place where someone thought he shouldn't have been. If I'm a hunter, and I'm on somebody else's land, and I don't see a sign, I don't know what to look for. And if someone walks up to me with a gun, saying, 'Get the "f" off my land, I'm not going to walk away with my back to this person."

That perception collides with Rice Lake Mayor Larry Jarvela's feelings about his town. He said there are "absolutely no problems" with racial tension in Rice Lake.

Jarvela, who is white, can't pin down how or why things could have escalated so intensely, or so tragically, in the woods. But it's not unexpected for coarse language to be exchanged with property owners and trespassers.

"It's pretty traditional that if you have a deer stand, and it's yours, there better not be anyone sitting in it," said Jarvela, himself a deer hunter.

"In the heat of discussion, you may make statements, but you don't really mean what you say," he said.