Law Office Stories--the Huyhn Family

    
“Plan on having a year with time enough to read every book you have ever wanted to get around to,” Paul Bernstein, criminal lawyer, told me. Russell Dawson said, “You never know where your next client is going to come from, and you’ll be surprised.” Dona Cloud advised “It won’t take long before you can pick and choose your cases and don’t have to take the ones you don’t want.”   I was unhappy in the private practice I had joined, and all of my buddies who had struck out on their own said “Do it. Hang out your own shingle.” Of course, they didn’t all have kids to support, and some seemed more intrepid than I. For example, Russell, a light-skinned black man wearing a scruffy beard, could have passed for an Arab, and he had just come back from a trip to Egypt, where he used illicit Playboy magazines as currency with taxi drivers to get him to the sights he wanted to see.

      Instead of hanging out my shingle, I joined a small practice, the Law Office of Loren D. Combs. Within two years, Loren left, and Duncan Wilson and I ran the business for the next 18 years.And it was true:  We had plenty of cases, and never knew where they would come from next.

     One of those cases that came from unforeseen sources was the case of Dennis Huyhn. Dennis was ethic Chinese from Vietnam, and he had been one of the “Boat people.” He and his siblings had landed in Los Angeles, and his sister told me that they had worked in sweat shops while they learned English from cartoons on TV. She had gone on to take a degree in engineering from UCLA.

     I met Dennis when he was operating a small convenience store in Seattle’s International District (too diverse to be called “Chinatown;” it was Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Philippine, and Samoan, at a minimum.) His store had been cited for selling liquor to an intoxicated customer, and he was fit to be tied. The truck driver who delivered his bread supplies was Mike Skagen, from Langendorf Bakery. At the time, Mike was the son-in-law of my boyfriend during those years, Darwin Sukut. “Have him call me,” I told Mike, and Dennis called.

            As the story evolved, Dennis had a mother who was old country Chinese, who had sold a bottle of fortified beer to a denizen of the streets of the International District. She spoke a dialect called “Chew Chow” (as I heard it pronounced.)  It was such a rare dialect that we couldn’t find an interpreter to turn her speech directly into English; she had to be translated first into Cantonese, and then the Cantonese translated into English. Through the interpreters, she explained that she recognized the customer, but that day appeared to be “Shower day;” he was all cleaned up.  She didn’t perceive him as being drunk.

            I wanted Mother Huynh to be able to tell the judge that because of the tight configuration of the store, with crowded, narrow aisles, she could not have observed the customer’s movements, such as drunken staggering, before she sold him the beer. I handed her a pencil and asked her to draw me a rough floor plan for the store, showing the location of the cash register.  She hesitated a moment, then handed the pencil back to me. “I can’t write, so I can’t draw,” she said. Interestingly, she had no problem with doing math in her head, and  could operate the cash register flawlessly.

            We brought the case to the Seattle District Court with our two interpreters.  Judge Darcy Goodman, who had been my colleague at the Seattle City Attorney’s office, very honestly found “Reasonable doubt,” and Mrs. Huynh was acquitted.

            The family treated me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant to celebrate. At one point, a waiter presented a magnificent lobster at our table for Dennis’s approval, and it appeared on our plates a few moments later as “Lobster in black bean sauce.” We went through probably 14 courses, and I finally figured out to leave a dab of  each course on my plate, because if I cleaned the plate, somebody would reload it.

            The Huynh family brought me many small cases for years, but only one stands out.  Dennis was being charged for having burglar alarms going off falsely in his shop. We finally figured out that a motion detector that alerted his alarm service, who called the police, was picking up on a twirling mobile advertising sign suspended in his store. And the sign was twirling from air currents rising out of a bin full of bananas.