Racial Stereotyping of Asians and Asian Americans and Its Effect on Criminal Justice: A Reflection on the Wayne Lo Case

Abstract

On December 14, 1992, 19-year-old Wayne Lo stormed the campus of Simon's Rock College of Bard, an elite private institution for gifted students, and began a twenty-minute shooting spree that left two people dead and four wounded. In the past seven years, I have followed the news coverage of the Wayne Lo case with increasing interest, not only because Wayne and I are both Chinese American, born in the same year, and raised under similar circumstances, but because the degrees of separation have unwittingly decreased between us. My husband Dan was Wayne's childhood friend, one who slept over at his house and shared adolescent confessions about girls, sex, and religion. Wayne's mother and father are longtime friends of my in-laws and serve as Dan's godparents. Our families have exchanged letters and photographs over the years and managed to pretend that while we graduated from college, married, and landed our first jobs, a young man in a Massachusetts prison did not exist. Early in law school, I began to think about Wayne more frequently. I prodded Dan for details about the young killer, hoping to discover any clues to Wayne's perplexing identity. Slowly, I arrived at a theory, not about why he killed that chilly day in December, but about how his race may have influenced his conviction and the denial of his appeal. In this paper, I will examine the racial imagery surrounding Wayne Lo's trial as an example of how stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans influence the criminal justice system. In Part I, I offer two prevailing categories of stereotypes, the "model minority" and "yellow peril," and highlight their criticisms. In Part II, I discuss how these stereotypes potentially influence legal actors in cases involving both Asian American victims and defendants. Finally, in Part III, I return to the Wayne Lo case and propose an explanation of how racial stereotyping may have colored