Jurors Weigh Life or Death for 4 Killers
VAN NUYS — Jurors in the Asian Boyz case must now decide whether four young men deserve to die for a 1995 killing spree or, having lived through the bloody Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia as children, they have suffered enough.
Prosecutors Laura Baird and Hoon Chun have argued that the defendants deserve no mercy because they had none for the 29 people they victimized, 10 of whom were killed.
Buth and Sothi Menh lived as children under the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s, where a quarter of the nation’s population is said to have died by execution, disease or mass starvation after the communist regime emptied the cities and forced the people to work the fields.
Another Cambodian, Bunthoeun Roeung, grew up “in refugee camps or on the run,” according to his lawyers.
A fourth, Son Thanh Bui, is Vietnamese. His defense has primarily been of his role as “aider and abettor” rather than triggerman in the shootings.
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