An appeals court has overturned the conviction of a man accused of shooting a friend over a debt during a late-night boat trip and leaving him to die in the ocean waters off of Dana Point, setting up a likely retrial in a rare murder case to be tried in federal court under maritime law.
Read more Kyle Francis Kennedy, the granddaughter of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, dies at 42
A panel of 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judges determined that the trial court judge should have declared a mistrial when a juror indicated she was struggling with mental-health issues due to pressure from other jurors rather than replace the woman with an alternate juror.
The appellate ruling means the first-degree murder conviction and the life sentence of Hoang “Wayne” Xuan Le for the Oct. 14, 2019, killing of his alleged drug-trafficking partner Tri “James” Minh Dao were overturned and the case was sent back to the trial court.
A U.S. Attorney Office spokesman said on Tuesday, Oct. 20, that federal prosecutors intend to retry the murder case.
The defense attorney who represented Le during his first trial did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Le will remain in federal custody pending the expected retrial.
His co-defendant — Sheila Ritze — was tried separately and her conviction and 21-year prison sentence were not impacted by the appellate court ruling.
Prosecutors during the earlier trials alleged that Le and Ritze conspired to lure Dao to his death with promises of a nighttime lobster fishing trip.
A fisherman found Dao’s body floating in the ocean waters off of Oceanside.
According to his own testimony, Le regularly trafficked marijuana with Dao from Southern California to Las Vegas. Le described Dao regularly borrowing from him and other friends, bookies and drug suppliers and then gambling the money away.
Exactly how much Dao owed Le was a point of contention during his trial. Others claimed Le told them Dao owed him $40,000. Le testified it was much less.
Dao told those he owed money to that if he died they could collect money from Dao’s longtime girlfriend via his life-insurance policy. Le’s belief that he could collect on that policy was his motive for killing Dao, prosecutors told jurors during his trial.
Le lived with his mother and older sister in Fountain Valley. He said he became friends with Ritze — a married property manager and avid fisherwoman — after meeting her at a Huntington Beach bar.
In Le’s telling, once he and Dao were out on the ocean in Ritze’s boat, Dao asked him for $2,000 and pulled out a gun when Le yelled he didn’t have the money. Le testified that he grabbed the gun and shot Dao in self-defense.
Read more Rams agree to terms with kicker Brandon McManus
Le also testified that Dao was still alive when he hit the water, but acknowledged telling Ritze to leave him behind.
By his own admission, Le told several people that he shot Dao because Dao owed him money. Le was apparently unaware that some of the people he bragged to were federal informants. He later claimed he was making up a story in order to appear tough.
Ritze told co-workers in a recorded conversation that she had a friend who killed people. Ritze also told her coworkers that she was making a “hit list,” adding, “I’m gonna take ’em out on my boat; they go on the boat but they are not gonna come back,” according to testimony during her trial.
Prosecutors argued the slaying was planned ahead of time.
Ritze’s mother-in-law testified that during a trip to Las Vegas prior to the killing Le made comments about planning to “off” Dao over a large debt by luring him out to sea on Ritze’s boat under the guise of a fishing trip.
After three days of jury deliberations during Le’s trial, the foreperson informed the court that one of the jurors was “unable to continue.”
The female juror, in her own note to the court, wrote that jury deliberations had “put my mental health into a position that has become dangerous to me.” The juror said her mental-health issue was “based on pressure from other jurors to reach a specific verdict.”
The jurors were ordered by the trial court judge to continue deliberating. But the jury soon sent a follow-up note indicating the same hold-out juror had “thoughts of hurting herself in order to be removed from this process.” The juror was dismissed and an alternate was seated.
Hours later, the jury reached the guilty verdict.
The appellate judges acknowledged that that the trial judge was trying to be as fair as possible, that it was a “genuinely difficult situation,” and that forcing a juror to continue to serve “in evident distress” was not an option.
“But faced with a juror whose distress both stemmed from her view of the prosecution’s case and was severe enough to preclude her from continuing to deliberate, our case law instructs that the only constitutionally permissible path forward was to declare a mistrial,” Judge Michelle T. Friedland wrote in the appellate court opinion.
A hearing in the case back at the trial court level had not yet been scheduled, according to court records.
Read more Orange County scores and player stats for Monday, Oct. 19