'Killing Fields' Conviction Overturned
.c The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) - A man convicted of killing the Oscar-winning actor who appeared in the movie ``The Killing Fields'' has had his conviction overturned by a federal judge.
Tak Sun Tan was convicted of first-degree murder and robbery in the Feb. 25, 1996 murder of Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor who lived through the terror of Cambodia's mass killings in the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge.
Ngor portrayed a reporter's translator in the 1984 movie ``The Killing Fields,'' for which he won a best-supporting actor Academy Award. He was found shot to death in a carport outside his apartment in Los Angeles.
According to court filings revealed Monday, U.S. District Judge Margaret Morrow approved the recommendation of a federal magistrate judge, who found the prosecutor in Tan's trial misrepresented evidence and played on jurors' emotions by stressing the hardships Ngor faced under the Khmer Rouge.
Deputy Attorney General Steven Mercer said the state hasn't decided whether to appeal the court's ruling, which states that Tan must receive a new trial or be released. If appealed, the case will go the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
During Tan's 1998 trial, prosecutors argued he and two other members of the Oriental Lazy Boyz gang killed Ngor because he refused to give up a gold locket containing his only photograph of his wife, who died in a camp in Cambodia.
But U.S. Magistrate Patrick Walsh wrote in his recommendation that investigators found a negative of the image in Ngor's house - meaning prosecutors argued facts not in evidence when explaining to jurors his willingness to die for the locket.
Walsh also chided prosecutors for urging the jury to convict Tan based on Ngor's ``laudable life or the injustice of the victim's prior suffering'' under the Khmer Rouge.