No indictment of cops who killed Viet man

A Santa Clara County grand jury last Thursday declined to indict any of the police officers who were involved in the shooting death of a mentally ill Vietnamese man, reports the San Jose Mercury News here.

Daniel Pham, 27, was fatally shot by police last May. He had attacked his brother with a knife, and the family had called 9-1-1.

When police arrived at the scene, they claimed they didn’t know Pham was a mental patient. The family, however, insisted that they were screaming and yelling, in English, to the police, that Pham was mentally ill. Police shot and killed Pham.

Two weeks ago, several community groups in San Jose, Viet and non-Viet, protested the shooting and presented a petition with a thousand signatures calling for the D.A. to open grand jury proceedings. (In the picture are Daniel Pham’s mother, his older brother, and the brother’s ex-girlfriend.)

The D.A. Dolores Carr, however, had left the building by the time the group got there. She had earlier said that she has a long-standing belief that grand jury investigations into police shootings should not be open to the public. This is a reversal from her predecessor’s policy, who opened the grand jury proceedings into shooting of Bich Cau Thi Pham, who was killed by San Jose police for holding a vegetable peeler smaller than a regular steak knife.

With the proceedings closed, the grand jury promptly rendered its decision not to prosecute any police.

Which raised even more questions. As anyone remotely connected to law enforcement knows, grand jury proceedings are the D.A. office’s one-man show, and the grand jury almost always does whatever the D.A. wants.

The Assistant D.A. in charge of the case, Dave Tomkins, told the Mercury News, “The grand jury heard all the evidence in the case and they declined to criminally indict. That says it all.” By “that says it all,” Tomkins may have meant whatever –  but to everyone else, that does say it all: That the D.A.’s office was slanting the evidence toward no indictment.

Richard Konda, the executive director of the Asian Law Alliance, noted that Pham’s father, an eyewitness to the shooting who may have told the grand jury what the family said to the police, was not asked to testify.

“What kinds of facts did they look at?” Konda said. “It’s a secret process, and that leaves so many questions unanswered.”

Now, even if the father had testified and all the evidence had been presented, the grand jury might still have come to the same conclusion. After all, a mentally unstable man with a knife is just as much of a threat as, or even more of a threat than, a sane man.

But at least we know the process was not skewed, and we can be assured the D.A.’s office is not helping the San Jose police run a Wild West show in the middle of Silicon Valley.