Did This Actually Happen?

It’s not an urban legend. Metropolitician (comment #2) tells you where you can hear the story and see the woman herself in court.

This is an excerpt from chapter 13 of “States of Confinement” by Joy James:

Kyung Richards spent seven years in a North Carolina prison on a murder charge. She grew up in an economically devastated region in rural Korea. As a teenager, she was raped. Not long after that incident, and after the death of her father, she began working in a bar close to a U.S. military base. Kyung began a relationship with a U.S. serviceman while still in her teens. They married and came to the United States, but her husband, who was an addict, became abusive and Kyung found herself on her own. Later she became involved with another man, also a former serviceman and also an addict who also became very abusive; and, after several years Kyung moved herself and her two young children to a motel. She found work at a local bar, but unable to afford child care, she left her children alone in the motel with the television on while she went to work. One day Kyung came home to find one of her children dead: Apparently her two-year-old son had tried to use a drawer in the bureau as a step in an attempt to reach the television, and both bureau and television fell on top of him. She called someone she knew, who advised her to call the police. Unaware of investigatory proceedings, she tidied up the motel room before police arrived; she was afraid that if the police saw an untidy room, they would take away her other child. When police arrived, Kyung was still extremely upset, and cried that she had killed her son, overcome by the anguish of a mother who held herself ultimately responsible for her son’s death, blaming herself that she was unable to afford a baby-sitter. Although the outcome of this tragedy is striking, the conditions that led up to it–a lack of ecoomic opportunities, services, and resources for racialized immigrant women with limited English fleeing domestic violence–are common.

The difficulty of Kyung’s loss was redoubled by her treatment in the hands of a criminal justice system quick to judge an Asian woman who could not speak English, who lived at a motel and left her children alone while she went to work in a bar. Although the death was an accident, Kyung was charged with second-degree murder for killing her son. Prosecutors argued that her first grief-stricken cries that she had killed her son were a confession to murder. Even though Kyung’s English abilities were severely limited at that time, she was not provided with a translator at her trial. The prosecutor, G. Dewey Hudson, interviewed in The Women Outside, described her crying on the stand during the trial as “shrill noises” which were “more animal-like, and so foreign to me; it was frightening to me,” indicating ways in which Kyung was racialized through the trial. She was convicted and sentenced and lost custody of her daughter.

After Kyung had been in prison several years, a group of Korean women activists learned of her predicament. They began a campaign for her release, and eventually the governor of the sate in which she was incarcerated granted clemency and Kyung was freed on parole. But Kyung had already served seven years. After leaving prison, she moved to New York, where the women involved in the campaign, along with others, founded the Rainbow Center. The center provided her with shelter, counseling, advocacy, and community support. In the years that followed, though, Kyung had to struggle with mental illness and periods of homelessness and never regained custody of her child.

Are there one or two different cases here? Dogbertt and thekorean, which case do you mean?

I’m pretty sure dogbert and I are looking at the same case, which is State v. France.

The book I excerpted says Kyung Richards which is a name I don’t think you could get from Chong Sun France unless someone remarried and also changed their first name. If I have time I’ll try to take a look at the documentary to see if the book got the name right.