The California Supreme Court Monday reversed the conviction and death sentence of one of two men for three murders in Pomona and Sacramento more than 30 years ago.
The state’s highest court found that Samreth Sam Pan’s attorney “made the strategic choice to concede Pan’s guilt of second-degree murder in an effort to avoid the death penalty,” despite “Pan’s express wish to maintain his innocence.”
The panel noted that the defense attorney “deprived Pan of his right to choose the fundamental objective of his defense,” finding that his conviction must be reversed and that the case has to be sent back to a courtroom in Los Angeles County.
Pan, now 49, was convicted along with co-defendant Run Peter Chhoun, now 53, of the July 27, 1995, killings of Nghiep Thich Le, 48, and his father, Hung Dieu Le, 73, in the victims’ Sacramento apartment and the Aug. 8, 1995, killing of Miguel Vargas Avina, 20, of Pomona, who prosecutors said was mistaken for a gang rival.
The two separate juries that heard the case found true the special circumstance allegations of multiple murders, murder during the commission of a burglary and that the two had previously been convicted of first-degree murder in 2000 involving a killing in San Bernardino County.
Chhoun also was found guilty of the murders of five other people in San Bernardino County in a case in which he was also sentenced to death. His conviction and death sentence in that case were upheld in a 2021 ruling by the California Supreme Court.
The court’s majority upheld Chhoun’s conviction in Monday’s ruling, but vacated the jury’s finding of a gang enhancement against Chhoun. In sending that portion of the case back, the panel noted that jurors were not instructed that the charged offenses could not be used to establish a pattern of criminal gang activity.
The majority of the panel rejected Chhoun’s claims that his convictions and sentence are invalid under the California Racial Justice Act of 2020.
In a dissenting opinion that contended that Chhoun’s death sentence required reversal, Associate Justice Goodwin Liu wrote that the prosecutor “invoked cultural scripts to set the jury’s expectations for how Cambodian immigrants should behave and then leveraged those stereotypes to cast (Chhoun) as deviant for failing to conform to expectations associated with his ethnicity.”
Associate Justices Kelli Evans and Martin Jenkins concurred in the dissenting opinion involving Chhoun.