ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Tough Sentence for a Foul Crime

Public intolerance with violence has led to extreme responses like the “three-strikes” sentencing measure for felons, which requires prison terms of 25 years to life and will lead to the costly warehousing of nonviolent offenders.

Last week in Superior Court, a judge showed that the tools were already on hand, without extremist legislation, to throw the book at a 19-year-old Santa Ana man convicted by a jury of shooting into a crowd at the Westminster Mall and seriously wounding a 13-year-old girl.

The shooting seemed to incorporate in one incident many of the outrages that have led to the public’s exasperation.

According to prosecutors, Phong Thanh Dang fired at least four shots into a crowd of shoppers on July 8, 1993, motivated by the dubious grievance of a “hard look” from another group of young people. The girl, Phuong Nguyen paid for this imagined hurt with a bullet in the back, while another slug whizzed through the pant leg of a second girl. Nguyen, now 14, testified that the shooting had left her with emotional scars, and that she continued to have difficulty eating and sleeping. She said she was afraid to go to crowded places.

Judge Luis A. Cardenas promptly dismissed defense arguments that Dang should be retried on a less serious charge, and ordered the gunman to serve four consecutive life terms, the maximum allowable sentencing.

Dang will not be eligible for parole for at least 64 years; prosecutors described the sentence as one of the harshest ever imposed in Orange County in a gang-related shooting that did not result in a fatality.

Cardenas did not stop there. He ordered Dang to serve an additional eight-year term even before the clock starts on his life sentences because he used a handgun and caused great bodily injury. He explained his tough sentence by saying, correctly, “It’s this type of conduct that brings a community to the edge of anarchy.”

The case illustrates that when it is serious about sending a message on violence, the criminal-justice system does have the means to put away for a long time those who place society at risk.