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Soon Du And Latasha Harlins Summary

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The main issue in the article is racial discrimination in providing judgments on cases between the blacks and their white counterparts. The racial discrimination is coupled with racial stigmatization where the blacks are regarded to be violent and gangsters. The judge uses this to humanize the killer while applying stigmatization to dehumanize the African-American girl. The facts about Soon Du and Latasha Harlins leave a lot to be desired regarding how the cases between the whites and the blacks are handled. Soon Du, her husband, and her son ran a liquor store in Los Angeles. On March 16, 1991 Du, a Korean immigrant was the one who stayed in the store instead of her son who had been threatened by a local gang member. A fifteen-year-old girl Latasha Harlins by name, an African – American came to the shop and the store owner killed her because of a dispute which had arisen over a bottle of juice. There was a security camera which recorded all …show more content…

Du and other Korean shopkeepers were praised as an innocent shopkeeper while Latasha Harshin was considered to be one of the gangs who terrorized the hardworking Koreans noncriminal by nature. The court of appeal noted that Soon Du had sold one business and decided to purchase this particular one. The judge should have labelled Soon Du as a consenting shopkeeper instead of all the innocence he heaped on him. Latasha Harshins background was brought before the judge, and there was no criminal in it. She was a high school graduate with a promise to improve her grades. She was an active member of a youth centre, the drill team’s assistant cheerleader, and a summer junior camp counsellor. If all these facts could have been considered during the process in court, then Judge Karlins should have been fair enough to know that this girl was innocent and not a member of any gang band, and Du should have been sentenced for

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