‘Thoughtful and Diligent’ Judge to Decide Penalty in Akai Gurley’s Death
By ALAN FEUER

In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talk around the Brooklyn courts about what Justice Danny K. Chun will do when he takes the bench on Thursday to sentence Peter Liang, the former police officer convicted two months ago in the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley in a housing project stairwell.

Some lawyers say Justice Chun, 54, of State Supreme Court is likely to follow the Solomonic path cleared for him by Ken Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, who pursued Mr. Liang on manslaughter charges but then softened the conviction by suggesting in a letter last month that he face no time in prison. Others say that Justice Chun has no choice but to jail Mr. Liang, and that even a brief prison term would send a tough message compared with Mr. Thompson’s recommendation.

But in the fractious world of the Brooklyn bar, where seven lawyers might have eight opinions, there seemed to be agreement on one issue: that Justice Chun was singularly suited to render a decision in the complicated case.

“He’s a very contemplative, thoughtful and diligent judge — no-nonsense in his demeanor,” said Michael Farkas, the president of the Kings County Criminal Bar Association, which is honoring Justice Chun at a gala on Saturday. “There are some highly emotional feelings about this case, as everybody knows. But bottom line: I know for a fact that he will do the right thing as he sees fit.”

Born in Seoul, Danny Chun came to New York with his family in 1973. They settled first in Elmhurst, Queens, then moved to nearby Bayside, where his father worked as a real-estate broker before becoming a minister. A driven and religious man himself, according to his friends, Mr. Chun attended Johns Hopkins University and obtained degrees in political science and philosophy. He went on to the Fordham University School of Law and upon graduation, in 1987, joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office as its first Korean-American prosecutor.

While working at the district attorney’s office, where he handled homicides and Asian gang cases, Mr. Chun once returned to Fordham Law for a student career day and found himself as one of the few public servants in a room of corporate lawyers.

“I still remember what he spoke about that day,” said Chad Sjoquist, a former Fordham student who became a lawyer and, eventually, a friend of Justice Chun’s. “He said: ‘If you want to sit at a desk all day and make lots of money, go work at a firm. But if you want to do something interesting and something that matters, become a D.A.’”

In 1999, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani plucked Mr. Chun from his supervisory job at the district attorney’s office and appointed him to Brooklyn Criminal Court. A few years later, Judge Chun had his first high-profile case: the harassment trial of the pornographer Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine.

With its scatological references (and a defendant who liked to dress in a white leather jacket with a set of stars and stripes), the trial was frequently absurd, although Judge Chun proved himself throughout to be sober and unflappable. At one point during jury selection, a potential member of the panel said she was uncomfortable with the uncouth language that kept emerging in court.

“I’m not asking if you’re comfortable or uncomfortable,” Judge Chun told her. “If you’re selected as a juror, are you going to be able to judge the case fairly and justly?”

In 2005, he was promoted to State Supreme Court, where he now handles many of Kings County’s rackets and police misconduct matters. He is currently presiding over the case of two Brooklyn officers charged in a 2014 assault after a security camera captured them beating a 16-year-old boy, Kahreem Tribble, during an arrest. He is also hearing the long-running legal ordeal of John Giuca, who for nearly a decade has been trying to overturn his conviction in the 2003 murder of Mark Fisher, a Connecticut college student killed in Brooklyn.

Justice Chun is not known for an effusive personality, and over the years he has built a reputation for being objective and evenhanded.

“He doesn’t strike me as an affable, knock-around kind of guy, but he’s fair, smart and very well respected,” said Steven Brounstein, a veteran defense lawyer who has appeared before the justice several times. “And, of course, he’s liked by all sides in the courthouse.”

The sentencing of Mr. Liang — the most prominent and, perhaps most troublesome, of Justice Chun’s career — will put those qualities to the test. Though caught up in the furor over the death of Eric Garner, who died after being put in a police chokehold in July 2014 on Staten Island, the Gurley case never neatly fit the narrative of other police killings of unarmed black men around the country.

There was no confrontation or direct interaction between Mr. Liang and Mr. Gurley, who died from a ricocheting bullet that Mr. Liang fired while on patrol in November 2014 in a dark stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York. And the prosecutors who tried Mr. Liang acknowledged that while he acted recklessly and failed to help his victim after the bullet struck, there was no evidence that he meant to kill or even injure Mr. Gurley.

Beyond those facts, the case was politicized almost from the moment it began. For Mr. Thompson, a Democrat who is Brooklyn’s first black district attorney, that meant balancing his sense of justice and the evidence against competing constituencies in the New York Police Department and in the city’s black community, which immediately called for Mr. Liang to be charged.

Some lawyers have said that Justice Chun will now face similar pressures. As the city’s first Korean-American judge, he has faced impassioned calls — mostly in the form of petitions and letters to the court — from New York’s Asian-American community to show leniency to Mr. Liang, who is of Chinese heritage.

“The undertone of race here just adds one more page to the script of how this all plays out,” Arthur L. Aidala, the president of the Brooklyn Bar Association, said. “But of every justice I know in New York, Chun has the background — and the backbone — to do what he feels is right.”

紐時撰文 相信梁彼得案法官裁決會公正

隨著因涉嫌槍殺非洲裔青年格利而被陪審團裁決二級誤殺等五罪俱成的前華裔警員梁彼得14日法官宣判刑期的時間臨近，社區上下對梁案主審法官Danny K. Chun將做何種量刑拭目以待。「紐約時報」記者Alan Feuer在12日撰文，認為這名54歲的韓裔法官將會做出公正裁決。

文章稱，儘管外界對法官可能做出的選擇的說辭各不相同，但大家都認同一件事，那就是Chun是能夠抉擇這一複雜案件的極為合適的人選。布碌崙刑事律師協會（Kings County Criminal Bar Association）主席Michael Farkas稱讚Chun是一位深思熟慮且勤奮的法官，「正如大家所知，這個案子牽扯眾多感情，但底線在於：我知道他會做出正確的決定」。

Chun出生於韓國首爾，1973年隨家人來到紐約，先在皇后區艾姆赫斯特定居，後又搬到貝賽附近，父親先是從事房產經紀工作，後來成為一名牧師。而Chun自己作為一名負有責任感且有信仰的年輕人，則選擇進入約翰霍普金斯大學（Johns Hopkins University）攻讀政治學和哲學，隨後又進入紐約復敦大學（Fordham University）法學院，並在1987年畢業後加入曼哈坦地區檢察官辦公室，成為該辦公室的首位韓裔檢察官。在那裡，他處理了諸多兇殺案及亞裔幫派案件。

1999年，前紐約市長朱利安尼（Rudolph W. Giuliani）提拔Chun到布碌崙刑事法庭（Brooklyn Criminal Court）。幾年後，他處理了人生中第一個備受關注的案件，即淫穢雜誌「Screw」出版商Al Goldstein的騷擾案。2005年，他被調升到州高等法院，開始處理眾多敲詐案和警察瀆職案。如今，他仍在審理2014年兩名警察被指控毆打16歲男童Kahreem Tribble一案，以及一起2003年被控殺害學生Mark Fisher的John Giuca在之後13年一直試圖推翻定罪一案。

一名老兵辯護律師Steven Brounstein表示，Chun很公平且聰明、受人尊重，「在法庭上，無論來自哪一方的人，都很喜歡他」。許多律師也稱，如今Chun將與布碌崙地區檢察官湯普森一樣，面臨來自非洲裔、亞裔社區等團體的多重壓力，14日的量刑也將是檢驗其品格的重要時刻。布碌崙律師協會(Brooklyn Bar Association)主席Arthur L. Aidala強調，在他認識的紐約法官當中，「Chun有能力、也有決心來做他認為正確的事情」。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/nyregion/thoughtful-and-diligent-judge-to-decide-penaltyin-akai-gurleys-death.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/usa/20160413/c13judge/zh-hant/

2016-04-14 世界日報 記者金春香