Ipse Dixit: A Mother's Eyes

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Publication year: 2022

Ipse Dixit: A Mother's Eyes

Context: A Japanese exchange student named Yoshi Hattori was shot and killed one Halloween night when he went to the wrong house for a party. He was dressed as John Travolta was dressed in Saturday Night Fever. The person who shot him was found not guilty in criminal court. Our firm represented the Hattori family in the civil trial where, through excellent legal work by my then-partner Charles Moore, the shooter was found responsible. This article came to me while watching this Japanese mother, in court, in a foreign land, speak, in Japanese, about her son.

It started as a collision between two cultures.

Their culture is 2000 years old. We are just barely past our 200th birthday.

The differences are visible.

They are Japanese. Everyone else is not.

Everyone else speaks English. They do not.

Like everyone else, we followed the news accounts of the story and the first trial, not knowing that the second trial would be ours.

Some people think the case was about gun control. It wasn't. Some think it was about the right to defend your home. It wasn't. Others think it was about the difference between the Japanese culture and ours. It wasn't.

It was about a person. A mother. A father. A family.

About their son's faith and hope in America.

About their faith and hope in their son.

About their faith and hope in our system of justice.

They continued to have faith and trust in our country and our system of justice when, if you read the newspapers, we do not.

There she sat on trial in America, thousands of miles from home, scared and confused, defending the...