Five people were found dead at a home in Ingleside, San Francisco, United States on the morning of Friday, March 23, 2012. The victims, all Chinese immigrants, were an elderly couple, two of their adult children, and their daughter-in-law. In Chinese-language media both in the United States and overseas, which devoted the most coverage to the killings, the case was usually referred to as the Lei family quintuple slayings.
Police initially believed the case to be a murder-suicide, but two days later arrested 35-year-old San Francisco resident Binh Thai Luc, a friend of one of the victims, and charged him with five counts of murder, five counts of robbery, and two counts of burglary. At his arraignment on April 5, 2012, Luc pleaded not guilty to the charges. After years of delays in preliminary hearings as prosecutors requested additional time to review evidence, Luc's trial finally began on October 10, 2017. Following a seven-week trial and a week of deliberation, on December 11 the jury found Luc guilty of all the murder and burglary charges, as well as five counts of attempted robbery. Luc was subsequently sentenced to five consecutive life terms and began serving his sentence at California State Prison, Corcoran in March 2018. On Luc's appeal three years later, a higher court overturned three of the attempted robbery convictions, but upheld the murder and burglary convictions, ruling that the evidence was sufficient and the jury instructions were proper.
Luc's arrest and conviction led to political controversy over deportation from the United States, in particular the Supreme Court ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis that existing statutes did not authorize long-term post-prison detention of criminals whose deportations could not be carried out. Luc, a native of Vietnam who immigrated to the U.S. legally in 1989 as a child, was ordered deported after a 1998 conviction for armed robbery, but was released in the U.S. after completing his sentence because Vietnam's repatriation agreement with the U.S. explicitly excludes people who arrived in the U.S. before 1995. Republican politicians suggested amending the law to permit longer-term detention of deportable criminals and to deny visas to citizens of countries which failed to issue a travel document to any person ordered deported from the United States, and in 2017, the Vietnamese and U.S. governments formed a working group to discuss deportation issues.
View More On Wikipedia.org
