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MOCAREADS: The Third Degree by Scott D. Seligman

This program is co-presented by the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Law and Order or almost any crime drama on American television can probably recite a suspect’s “Miranda rights” by heart. You know–the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, etc. But what most people don’t know is that these rights had their roots in the compelling case of a young Chinese man accused of murdering three of his countrymen in Washington, DC in 1919.

The nation’s capital had never seen anything quite like it: three foreign diplomats with no known enemies assassinated in the city’s tony Kalorama neighborhood, and no obvious motive or leads. The Washington police were baffled. But once they zeroed in on a suspect, young Ziang Sung Wan, a sometime Chinese student living in New York, they held him incommunicado without formal arrest for more than a week until they had browbeaten him into a confession.

Please join Scott D. Seligman for the launch of The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice, part murder mystery, part courtroom drama and part landmark legal case that tells the forgotten story of a young man’s abuse by the police and his arduous, seven-year journey through the legal system that drew in Warren G. Harding, William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John W. Davis and even J. Edgar Hoover. It culminated in a landmark Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Louis Brandeis that set the stage for Miranda v. Arizona many years later.











When: Thu., May. 17, 2018 at 6:30 pm
Where: Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre St.
212-619-4785
Price: $35/person (includes copy of book); $12/adult; $5/student, educator, senior; FREE for MOCA and NCUSCR members
Buy tickets/get more info now
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This program is co-presented by the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Law and Order or almost any crime drama on American television can probably recite a suspect’s “Miranda rights” by heart. You know–the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, etc. But what most people don’t know is that these rights had their roots in the compelling case of a young Chinese man accused of murdering three of his countrymen in Washington, DC in 1919.

The nation’s capital had never seen anything quite like it: three foreign diplomats with no known enemies assassinated in the city’s tony Kalorama neighborhood, and no obvious motive or leads. The Washington police were baffled. But once they zeroed in on a suspect, young Ziang Sung Wan, a sometime Chinese student living in New York, they held him incommunicado without formal arrest for more than a week until they had browbeaten him into a confession.

Please join Scott D. Seligman for the launch of The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice, part murder mystery, part courtroom drama and part landmark legal case that tells the forgotten story of a young man’s abuse by the police and his arduous, seven-year journey through the legal system that drew in Warren G. Harding, William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John W. Davis and even J. Edgar Hoover. It culminated in a landmark Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Louis Brandeis that set the stage for Miranda v. Arizona many years later.

Buy tickets/get more info now