Bat Beating, Asian Hate Crimes Spur $3.5 Million in Pro Bono Aid

Sixty-nine-year-old Anh Lê says he was beaten with a baseball bat by a father-son duo while walking in San Francisco’s Chinatown in November 2019. A team of lawyers has been working for Lê since May, providing services that they would normally bill for $120,000.

The Alliance for Asian American Justice says it has provided more than $3.5 million worth of pro bono legal services to victims of anti-Asian hate crimes since its creation in April, spanning more than 50 cases. The group includes lawyers from a number of large law firms and corporate legal departments.

“I’m so deeply grateful,” an emotional Lê told Bloomberg Law. “On my evening walks and even during the daytime when I pray to my God, I always make sure to thank God for helping me receive help.”

Lê said he reached out to Alliance board member and McDermott Will & Emery partner Wilson Chu after reading about the group earlier this year. King & Spalding partner Quyen Ta is on the team representing Lê, along with lawyers from her firm and Applied Materials Inc.

One of Lê’s attackers, the father, had already been sentenced to one year of probation by the time Lê heard about the Alliance. His attorneys say that happened without Lê’s input, potentially in violation of a state victims’ rights law.

Ta’s team is now seeking $1,700 in restitution. It also helped secure Lê the opportunity to read a victim impact statement during the restitution hearing and helped find him mental health services.

Nearly 90 law firms and 22 in-house departments have joined the Alliance to support Asian American and Pacific Islander victims of race-based crimes, including firms like Cravath Swaine & Moore and Kirkland & Ellis, and legal chiefs of companies like Citigroup Inc., Tyson Foods Inc., and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

But not all victims are like Lê. Despite the resources and legal power behind the Alliance, the group faces a key challenge in its pursuit of justice. Many victims of violent hate crimes aren’t willing to take legal action due to wariness of the legal system or cultural influences, even as physical assaults comprise a growing percentage of all racially motivated hate incidents.

Assaults increased nearly 54% between 2020 and 2021, according to a report from nonprofit Stop AAPI Hate that analyzed more than 9,000 reported incidents from March 2020 through June 2021. That’s around 490 assaults from March to December last year, and 750 assaults from January to June this year.

Don Liu, an Alliance board member and chief legal and risk officer of Target Corp., said it can be frustrating when a victim chooses not to take legal action against a perpetrator because it’s “not just about them.”

“Our overall goal goes well beyond just the victim,” Liu said. “Yes, we want to help the victim. Yes, we want to make sure that the victim’s rights are pursued. But there’s also a larger message that comes with that pursuit. It’s preventative, it’s to deliver the message that there are consequences if you’re going to wind up hurting them, and obviously, we will not be able to pursue those broader messages if a victim chooses not to pursue it.”

The group is co-chaired by Gibson Dunn partner Debra Wong Yang and Quinn Emanuel partner Tai Park. Its board members include Target’s Liu, McDermott Will & Emery’s Chu, and Norton Rose Fulbright partner Brian Sun.

“Can you imagine?” Chu said. “You are a little old Asian lady. Someone abuses you at the bus stop, at the subway. All of a sudden, you have a team of $1,000 lawyers behind you. That’s what we’ve been able to do.”

‘All Dressed Up, Nowhere To Go’

The Alliance has worked on multiple high-profile cases, including the Atlanta spa shooting that left six Asian women and two others dead, and the FedEx Ground facility shooting in Indianapolis that killed eight, including four Sikh men.

The group has assigned more than 50 cases to member firms and evaluated over a hundred others, according to its board members. Their work ranges from pursuing criminal charges to helping victims’ families with funeral services.

But there are still many victims that reject their services. In March, a 65-year-old Asian American woman was attacked outside an apartment building in New York as two security guards reportedly stood by instead of helping. The incident was widely publicized, and Chu said the Alliance attempted to represent the woman to no avail.

“We had Alliance members who said, ‘Get this lady for us. We will sue the hell out of the building owner.’ We had guys ready to go,” Chu said. But, “Nothing. We’re all dressed up, nowhere to go.”

Alliance members said sometimes it takes individual “coaxing and explaining” to convince a victim to accept legal aid.

“Many of these folks are immigrants, and back in their home country, it was not beneficial for them to get involved with law enforcement,” Wong Yang said. “The inclination is more to keep quiet and to not cause any attention to yourself, and we have to explain to them that no, here in the United States, you can actually have representation and you have rights.”

Some of the Alliance’s cases are referrals from other Asian American advocacy groups, such as the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. But Park said they “have not had the flood of referrals” they expected.

“I would say that there has been a decrease in the referrals to us,” Park said, “and part of the work of the Alliance is to try to not necessarily rely on referrals from the community organizations but scouring the media to see if there are reports, and then using those reports as a basis for locating the victims and seeing if they have an interest in getting representation.”

Finding Evidence

Even if a victim accepts the group’s help, not every case will make it to court and even fewer are charged as hate crimes.

Alliance board members said it can be difficult to convince a district attorney to classify an assault as a race-based hate crime because there has to be evidence of intent.

“What’s important for us as a community is to actually call out a race-based crime when it’s evident, and sometimes that’s hard to prove because you have to show intent,” Wong Yang said. “Unless somebody is yelling out, ‘I hate you because you’re from Japan,’ you’re not going to know.”

Wong Yang said lawyers can look for clues, like the perpetrator’s online activity and other behavioral patterns and work collaboratively with law enforcement to make the case.

That’s what former Georgia U.S. Attorney BJay Pak did after the Atlanta spa shootings that left six Asian women and two others dead, according to Wong Yang, and prosecutors later sought hate crime charges in addition to the death penalty.

“It’s important for lawyers to step up and be at the forefront of all that,” said Sun, the Norton Rose Fulbright partner. “That’s what’s motivating us and what motivates me. I’m a former prosecutor, I can bond with an investigator or a DA and talk the lingo. It’s good if you get the right people in there advocating for allocation of resources and making this a priority for law enforcement.”