The Wrongful Murder Conviction That Ignited a Pan-Asian Activist Movement

I used to be a bit disoriented when the plot of Free Chol Soo Lee shifted solely 20 minutes in, as a journalist near-definitively assessed that the eponymous prisoner was harmless of the homicide for which he was serving a life sentence. It felt like issues had been transferring too rapidly. However the documentary doesn’t abide by the same old guidelines of true crime. Administrators Julie Ha and Eugene Yi are much less within the meticulous particulars of legislation enforcement and the authorized course of than within the private and social impacts of institutional racism, and particularly incarceration. The sequence of occasions by which Chol Soo Lee was wrongfully convicted within the mid ’70s is laid out, after all. It’s additionally stuffed with infuriating particulars about how San Francisco police and prosecutors railroaded him after deciding on him as their perp based mostly on defective investigating and racial profiling early of their investigation. However there isn’t a play-by-play recap of the method that movies like these too typically resort to, which appears designed to attraction extra to morbidly minded beginner detectives than to any actual sense of compassion for the human beings concerned.

This strategy is in step with the movie’s broader considerations concerning the thornier elements of Lee’s story, which a extra conventionally minded documentary is perhaps content material to brush over. Regardless of his case spurring a pan-Asian activist motion that resulted in his retrial and eventual exoneration, Lee continued to wrestle after his launch. Changing into a trigger célèbre doesn’t assist you discover and hold a job, or purge the trauma of incarceration. Round half of the previously incarcerated will relapse ultimately. Lee doesn’t have a clear, sentimentally inspirational “redemption” arc that may enable viewers to stroll away in the end feeling good. But that is a characteristic, not a bug, as a result of a sentimental strategy dangers dropping sight of the elemental injustice right here — not simply in Lee’s particular case, however within the broader establishments underlying it.