“Free Chol Soo Lee” From SF Law Enforcement Railroading

Chol Soo Lee may not have been born with a name that portended misfortune, like Jonah Hex.  But in recounting Lee’s life, Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s new documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee” shows how misfortune seemed conjoined to its titular subject.  The film, which opens August 19, 2022 at the Roxie Theater, will be of particular interest to San Francisco residents who aren’t cheerleaders for the S.F. Police Department.  

On June 7, 1973, Chol Soo Lee was arrested by the SFPD for the high-profile murder of Yip Yee Tak.  The victim happened to be an adviser to the San Francisco Chinatown gang known as the Wah Ching.  Since 1969, that gang had engaged in acts of retaliation and murder with rival Chinese gang Chung Ching Yee aka the Joe Boys.  However, 1973 was the year the fighting between the two gangs turned into open warfare.    

The continued existence of this Chinatown gang violence made San Francisco’s law enforcement look truly bad in the public eye.  Lee’s arrest seemed to be a magic PR bullet.  By arresting Lee four days after Tak’s killing, the cops showed they were doing Something about Chinatown’s gang wars.  By doing everything possible to put Lee away for life, the District Attorney’s office flaunted its tough-on-crime credentials.    

But that neat picture of Lee’s guilt falls apart when certain points are taken into account.   Lee looked nothing like the killer described by eyewitnesses.  Being a Korean with limited English skills made the interaction of Lee with Chinatown gangs seem implausible.  Even members of the Chinatown community were convinced Lee didn’t kill Tak.  However, these points didn’t prevent Lee from facing a lifetime of rotting away behind the walls of Deuel Vocational Institution.

Free Chol Soo Lee

Yet as Ha and Yi’s film shows, getting falsely arrested and convicted for a crime he didn’t commit turned out to be just one of the many misfortunes that shadowed Lee’s life.  Other bits of bad luck befalling Lee over the years would include not being able to take advantage of school ESL programs (because such programs at the time existed only for Chinese speakers), being mistakenly imprisoned for presumed mental illness, and having a really crappy defense lawyer at his trial for the Tak murder.

But Ha and Yi’s documentary isn’t just the story of how Lee got royally screwed by the S.F. criminal justice system.  It’s also the story of the movement that arose to clear Lee’s name and get him out of prison.  In this pan-Asian community movement (which also included members of the Black community), leftist Asian college radicals worked with conservative Korean grandmothers to seek justice for Lee.  Notable participants in the movement would include Korean-American journalist K.W. Lee, future S.F. Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and famed criminal defense attorney Tony Serra.

Yet the ultimate question posed by “Free Chol Soo Lee” is whether its titular subject’s life could have been fully liberated from the shadow of misfortune.  Ha and Yi’s film offers a different answer than the fiction film inspired by Lee’s case, “True Believer.”

Whatever S.F. law enforcement hoped to accomplish by railroading Lee, one effect it didn’t have was deterring the occurrence of the notorious Golden Dragon Restaurant Massacre.

(“Free Chol Soo Lee” was a runner-up for the 2021 Library Of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize For Film.)

(Directors Julie Ha and Eugene Yi will appear in person for Q&As after the film’s screenings at the Roxie on August 19-21, 2022.)