Zealous community defender moves to District Attorney’s Office
On the morning of October 1, Victor Hwang climbed the steps of the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street to start his new job, fully aware that he was also stepping down a few rungs along the professional ladder.
Hwang’s old job was to defend the voiceless and the helpless; his new job as assistant district attorney was to put criminals in jail. Just like that, one of San Francisco’s most respected and tenacious community activists seemingly completed his big career jump over the fence.
That was six weeks ago, Hwang says, and the “friendly ribbing” started pouring in. Friends and colleagues, both joking and serious, wanted to know: how could the dogged public defender suddenly switch sides?
“I’m just asking people to wait and see,” he said lightly, before turning flat serious. “In a year’s time, if I’m not doing justice, then you come let me know.”
Hwang’s hire marks the further expansion of the Asian American contingent in the diverse San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, but his departure does signal a loss for the area’s Asian legal advocacy groups, in particular the Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach organization, where he was managing attorney for six years.
“When Victor was here, people would call with all these cutting-edge cases because he’s so well known in the community,” said Christine Hoang, former chairperson of API Legal Outreach’s board of directors.
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala D. Harris said in a statement last month that Hwang’s “wealth of experience will be a tremendous asset to the Office, especially around domestic violence, hate crimes and elder abuse.”
His resume before six weeks ago would show that nearly all of his past work was from the other side of the law.
After joining the Los Angeles County Public Defenders Office fresh out of USC law school in 1992, Hwang worked some 50 jury trials and got his first homicide case under his belt. By 1996, he had joined the Asian Legal Caucus in San Francisco, America’s oldest civil rights and legal organization for low-income Asian Pacific Americans, and began his professional journey along community advocacy in earnest. At the Asian Law Caucus, he helped the family of Kuanchung Kao win a $1 million judgment after two Rohnert Park police officers in 1998 shot the intoxicated Kao because he held a stick “in a ninja pose,” and refused to let Kao’s wife, a registered nurse, administer first aid while Kao lay handcuffed on the pavement and eventually died from excessive bleeding.
He filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of Southeast Asians who lived in public housing against the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1997, and also contributed to the defense of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who was accused of stealing nuclear secrets for China in 1999.
Hwang would go on to manage a dozen attorneys at API Legal Outreach, with a focus on immigration, family law and elder issues. Known for his commanding but humorous office presence, younger attorneys watched Hwang become heavily involved in the activism surrounding the Eddie Zheng case and the state’s gay marriage legal struggle.
“The mark of maturity as a community is when you can stop looking just at your own issues and begin speaking out on these other issues,” he said about joining the LGBT corner.
For his work, Hwang received “Local Hero” awards from the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Chinese World Journal, and was accorded “Litigator of the Year” by the Asian American Bar Association and the “Outstanding Legal Service” award by the Minority Bar Coalition.
But for all of his work and personal success, Hwang noticed distressing patterns of vulnerability among both Asian Pacific American victims and defendants. “From my experience, the biggest problems were a lack of access to law enforcement and cultural barriers,” Hwang said. The lack of sufficient interpreters often meant that victims’ cases would be dropped because the rushed court wasn’t aware of their silent, confused presence. He remembers judges and jury members questioning the testimony of defendants who did not make eye contact, unaware of its confrontational significance in Asian cultures.
Hoang called Hwang “an excellent courtroom lawyer” but noted that acclimating himself to being a small fish in a large pond may be a challenge. “He’s now stepping in as the low man on the totem pole,” Hoang said. “He’s definitely going to have to learn some new tricks.”
Hwang admits as much himself. “I’m going to work my way up from the bottom again,” he said. “The reason is that there are gaps in the system for ethnic communities, and I’m here to play a role in plugging those gaps.”
Realizing the error in his own premature assessment of the D.A.’s Office, he similarly urges others to judge him by the work that he does, not his position.
“There’s so much power in the D.A.’s office,” he said. “I’m just asking folks to wait and see what I do.”
