K.W. Lee, a pioneering Asian American journalist whose reporting led to the release of a Korean immigrant on death row in California, and who covered the Koreatown community targeted in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, died on March 8 at age 96, at his home in Sacramento, The New York Times reports. Lee, a Korean immigrant who was sometimes described as the dean of Asian American journalism, took a top job in the so-called ethnic press after years as an investigative reporter at mainstream newspapers, most notably The Sacramento Union, which he joined in 1970. Lee went on to write more than 100 articles exposing problems with the jury conviction of Chol Soo Lee, who had been brought to the U.S. from Seoul at age 12, in the murder of a Chinese gang leader in San Francisco.
After he was found guilty in 1974 and given a life sentence, he killed another inmate in a knife fight — he said it was self-defense — and landed on death row at San Quentin prison. His reporting identified flaws in the original conviction, which raised questions about the difficulty of identifying suspects across racial lines. Although the murder took place during daylight hours in Chinatown, the only eyewitnesses the police found to testify were white tourists. The arresting officer identified Chol Soo Lee as “Chinese.” K.W. Lee’s articles for The Sacramento Union in the 1970s about Chol Soo Lee were photocopied and passed around by social workers, students and grandmothers in various Asian communities — Korean, Chinese, Japanese — uniting them in a movement to free him. It was an early example of political activism based on a shared Asian American identity.
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