Thien Minh Ly
Gunner Jay Lindberg
Facts of the Crime:
The California Supreme Court unanimously upheld the first death sentence for a hate crime in the state.
The Court's ruling against Gunner Jay Lindberg was handed down on August 28, 2008, 12 years after he brutally murdered a 24-year-old Vietnamese immigrant in Tustin, California. In 1997, an Orange County Superior Court jury convicted Lindberg of murder in the first degree with the special circumstances of both a hate-crime and attempted robbery; the judge sentenced him to death on December 12, 1997. In affirming the sentence in 2008, the Court ruled that "the evidence overwhelmingly showed that the defendant was a racist who regarded non-whites as subhuman." On January 28, 1996, Lindberg, 21 at the time, and Domenic Michael Christopher, then 17, approached the victim, asked him if he had a car, then stomped, kicked, and stabbed him 22 times (including 14 times in the heart), slit both of his jugular veins, called him a "Jap," and left him to die on the Tustin High School tennis courts on which he had been rollerblading. His body was found the next morning. According to authorities, after the attack Lindberg and Christopher threw away the butcher knife they had used, bought cigarettes, then went back to Lindberg's house, where they smoked marijuana, played video games and watched horror movies.
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