Jury hung in Tan Nguyen’s case

Tan Nguyen reading a statement to the press in 2006, when he was investigated by the state Department of Justice.

The jury deadlocked in the trial of former Congressional candidate Tan Nguyen, and the judge declared a mistrial, reports the OC Register’s Martin Wisckol here.

Nguyen is accused of lying to investigators and getting a campaign worker to take the blame for his actions in sending out a mailer targeting Latino voters trying to get them to not vote. The federal judge in the trial of the polled the jury late Friday. They were stuck at 11-1 in favor of conviction on one count of lying to investigators and 9-3 on one count involving the campaign worker.

“We’re disappointed that we didn’t get an acquittal, but we’ll live to fight another day,” said Dean Steward, Nguyen’s attorney.

The prosecution has not decided whether it will retry the case. It must decide by the Sept. 13 status hearing.

The case arose out of the 2006 elections. Earlier this year, Nguyen ran again in the Republican primary, but lost to the party establishment’s favorite, Van Tran. Tran, for his part, went to a Tea Party and joyfully posed for pictures with a bumper sticker that says “Jail Tan Nguyen.”

Apparently, he thought better of it, and his afterthoughts were strong enough for him to claim in writing that the bumper sticker was “thrust on me.” A Vietnamese-language paper took the story and picture off its web site.

Tan Nguyen overwhelmingly won the Republican primary in 2006, getting 55.4% of the vote in a three-way race. Going into the general, Nguyen’s campaign sent out a letter that’s commonly interpreted by Democrats and Republicans alike as threatening U.S. citizens of Mexican origins that they can’t vote. The Governator Schwarzenegger (still popular back then) called it “appalling,” OC GOP leader Scott Baugh said he didn’t believe Nguyen’s denial, and all the Vietnamese candidates who only a month earlier had taken a joint “solidarity” campaign photo with him (Van Tran, Lan Quoc Nguyen, etc.) all jumped ship.

Later discussions centered on whether the word “emigrado” in the letter refers to non-citizen immigrants, or to all immigrants, totally ignoring any chilling effects the letter may have. The state knew it, though, and sent out counter-letters to all the people on the Tan Nguyen mailing list.

The State of California investigated him. However, in 2007, the new Attorney General, Democrat Jerry Brown, thought it was no-harm-no-foul and voluntarily dismissed the case.

In 2008, however, the U.S. Justice Department under Republican President George W. Bush indicted Nguyen.