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"It's like Bobby Seale said, 'Seize the time,'" Adachi says, quoting the co-founder of the Black Panther Party. "This is the time when race and criminal justice reform are at the forefront, and I intend to work with others to make that happen. I want to empower line public defenders to be able to not only be zealous advocates in the courtroom, but be zealous and effective advocates on the street."
On the evening of June 3, 1973, Yip Yee Tak left a bakery in San Francisco Chinatown, stepped into the street, and was shot in the head. The murder of the Chinatown gang leader was quickly pinned on Chol Soo Lee, a 21-year-old Korean immigrant who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Lee was innocent, however, and the campaign to free him served as a turning point in the life of Jeff Adachi.
Adachi had grown up the son of an auto mechanic dad and lab technician mom in Sacramento, working what he calls "the grossest jobs" in the world. He plucked 40 to 50 ducks an hour for hunters (he still doesn't have fingerprints on some of his fingers as a result) and cleaned coagulated blood out of test tubes. He wasn't a good student, and his guidance counselor urged him to follow in his dad's footsteps and become a mechanic.
Adachi's parents were raised in poverty, and he calls his upbringing "lower middle class." His maternal great-grandparents had eloped from Japan to Hawaii in the late 1800s. They moved to San Francisco the following decade, then after the 1906 earthquake to French Camp, where they became onion farmers. His father's family lived in Walnut Grove, a segregated community where whites lived on one side of the river and Japanese and Chinese people on the other.
Adachi was in third grade when he learned that his parents and grandparents had been interned during World War II. He recalls getting into a fight with another kid at school who taunted him: "He said, 'Your parents were in the camp or in jail,' and I said, 'No they weren't,' and we got in a fight." Adachi was suspended from school. His mother later explained that they had committed no crime, but were interned because they were Japanese-Americans. It was an early lesson in injustice that Adachi says has influenced him throughout his life.
The prospect of a life working as a mechanic motivated Adachi to get serious about his studies, and he attended community college in Sacramento before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. At first, Adachi says, he "just wanted to make money," and he planned to attend business school at Cal.
The Berkeley campus Adachi arrived on was a far cry from the school's activist heyday of the late 1960s, but he and a group of four friends from Sacramento found their way to radical politics after learning about the case of Chol Soo Lee. Reporting on the case revealed that Lee's conviction was due to faulty eyewitness testimony and police and prosecutorial misconduct. Lee later killed a man in prison (in self-defense, he claimed) and was sent to death row.
The case galvanized the Asian-American community, and Adachi and his friends got involved. They had much to learn about effective activism. (One of the first rallies they organized took place outside the federal court, though Lee had been convicted in state court.) Adachi and his friends also began studying the works of radical thinkers including Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, as well as Huey Newton, Seale, and other Black Panthers. Adachi switched his major to Asian American Studies.
"I think what drew me to this fight for justice ... a lot of it was identity," Adachi says. "You're trying to figure out who you are and how you fit in. Learning about your history was big — learning Asian American history. By that time I knew about the [internment] camps and all that, but I didn't really know about black history, Latino history, Native American culture and history. When you start learning about that, a few things happen. You broaden your understanding, and then you get pissed."
The Chol Soo Lee Defense Committee and a new team of lawyers fought for years to secure a new trial, and Lee was ultimately acquitted and freed from prison. Another of Adachi's contributions to the fight was playing bass with a band that released a single in 1978 to raise money for the defense team. "The Ballad of Chol Soo Lee" tells the tale of much of Adachi's life work in the courts:
The courts convicted Chol Soo on a hot Sacramento day
By a frosty white judge and a stone-cold D.A.
He's been in jail since '73 a soul on ice
Can you call it blind justice? You better start thinking twice.
Chol Soo Lee died this past December at 62. Adachi delivered his eulogy.
"You're a potted plant. You're a public defender. Your job is to go into the holding cell and get that man to plead guilty."
Those are the words Jeff Adachi recalls being told by a judge in one of the first felony cases he tried as a young attorney in the Public Defender's Office. When Adachi went ahead with the trial anyway — his client was facing a 16-year sentence for auto burglary and didn't want to plead guilty — the judge called the attorney up to the bench and warned him, "I'm going to enjoy sentencing your client to every year of the 16 years."
Adachi is inured to the "potted plant" expectations many judges, prosecutors, defendants, and the general public have of public defenders. He's a keen observer of the media — he even directed a film, The Slanted Screen, about how Asian-American men are portrayed in popular culture. "Public defenders are routinely lampooned on television, rap music, popular culture, and movies, and so one of the challenges in being a public defender is disproving that and proving yourself," he says.
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