Improperly Written Sentence Allows 'Menace' to Avoid Arrest

Nam Quoc Hoang ended his Virginia state prison term for attempted murder in Arlington County with a dim future in front of him. It was 2008, and, as a Vietnamese national, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents detained him—and later released him—when he left prison.

Free in Virginia on post-release supervision, Hoang soon began breaking the law again, according to court records: returning to the scene of the attempted murder in violation of a ban, and threatening to shoot people. He allegedly became addicted to crack cocaine. Later, his family would tell his post-release supervision officer they feared he would kill them.

Hoang’s activities only appeared to end in January, when Fairfax County police , turning up a stash of drugs Hoang allegedly planned to distribute. He was arrested and charged. Released on bail in February, Hoang failed to show up for a hearing earlier this month March, and there is now a new warrant out for his arrest.

But why did it take so long to arrest him?

Although Hoang was on post-release supervision—a program similar to parole—and the Commonwealth of Virginia knew about his violations, officials were all but powerless to send Hoang back to prison or report him for deportation. That’s because Hoang has been the recipient of two extremely helpful legal statuses: he can’t be deported because he came to the United States just months before a 1995 deadline between the United States and Vietnam that allows deportation; and he could not be sent back to prison for violating his post-release supervision because his original sentence was apparently written incorrectly, according to court records.

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Hoang was born in Vietnam on April 14, 1976, along with his twin brother, Viet. Nam Hoang came to the United States in October 1994.

In 2003, Viet’s marriage was in crisis. After what court records describe as a “domestic disturbance,” his wife moved in with a female friend. This began Viet Hoang’s feud with a man named Quong Truong, the boyfriend of the woman Viet Hoang’s wife was living with.

According to Nam Hoang’s court file, his twin brother, Viet, began leaving threatening messages on Truong’s voicemail. These messages prompted Truong to get a protective order against Viet Hoang. He also purchased a 9 mm pistol.

On September 7, 2003, Truong and his girlfriend arrived at Eden Center, a strip mall in Falls Church notable for its popularity with Vietnamese-Americans and a record of violence, including a fatal pool hall shooting in 1997.

Soon after the couple arrived, someone told Truong and his girlfriend that the Hoang brothers were already there. As the couple went to their car to leave, Truong said he saw Nam Hoang running at him, yelling Viet’s name, according to court records. Then, Truong saw Viet Hoang, allegedly shooting at him. Truong reported he dodged the bullets, and, as he drove away, returned fire with his new gun. Although no one was injured, police later found six 9 mm casings and three .45 casings in the parking lot.

Viet Hoang was arrested in December 2003, but police did not arrest Nam Hoang until April 2004, when they found him in New Jersey. After being brought back to Arlington County, Nam Hoang was charged with attempted murder. Prosecutors offered him a chance to testify against his brother, but he refused.

Nam Hoang claimed he was actually in New Jersey running his girlfriend’s nail salon during the shooting, and Viet claimed he hadn’t seen his brother the day of the shooting. But a police detective said he had seen both Viet and Nam at an Eden Center club the night of the shooting, and Nam Hoang’s alibi didn’t convince the jury. Hoang was found guilty of attempted murder and use of a firearm, and sentenced to two and three years in prison, respectively, to be served concurrently. He was also sentenced to three years of post-release supervision, a form of suspended sentence created after Virginia abolished parole in 1994. Hoang received the maximum sentence for post-release supervision.

Upon his release in November 2008, Nam Hoang was handed over to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Because he was a foreign national convicted of a crime, Hoang met the standards for deportation. Almost.

“At that time it was determined that the defendant, who is a Vietnamese immigrant, could not be deported because there is no pact between the United States and Hanoi, Vietnam to issue travel papers,” reads a note in Hoang’s court file.

Actually, such a pact had just been established months before, in January 2008, but Vietnamese citizens with criminal records could only be deported if they had arrived in the United States after July 12, 1995—the day the two countries established official relations.

Because Hoang arrived in October 1994—eight months before the deportation date—he could not be deported, along with an estimated 6,200 other Vietnamese citizens. Unable to take Hoang out of the country, ICE let him go to serve his three-year post-release supervision sentence on February 27, 2009.

Hoang was assigned to Michael Simmons, an officer in Virginia’s Probation and Parole District 10, which handles cases in Arlington County and Falls Church. Unlike his other assignees, Simmons couldn’t send Hoang back to prison if he violated his supervision because the original post-release supervision sentence did not include a provision covering such situations.

According to Simmons, state courts were struggling with properly sentencing inmates to post-release supervision when Hoang went before the judge in 2005. “A lot of courts didn’t know how to sentence those offenders,” Simmons says.

Unlike parole, which allows convicts to leave prison before serving their entire prison sentence, convicted defendants with post-release supervision will serve their full prison sentences. If the defendant violates the conditions of his or her post-release supervision after finishing the prison term, the defendant can be sent back to prison to finish the term of supervision. Post-release supervision was a relatively new law in Virginia, and not all courts were applying supervision correctly when Hoang was going through his trial and sentencing, according to Simmons.

“Some of them would leave out that equation, some wouldn’t quote the whole equation,” Simmons says.

In Hoang’s case, Simmons says, the court left out the ability to revoke Hoang’s supervision and send him back to prison. As a result, Simmons says he could monitor Hoang, but, no matter what Hoang did to violate his supervision, Simmons could not send him back to prison.

“Basically, it was an illegal court order,” Simmons says.

Other parole officers thought it was illegal, too. When Simmons met Hoang, Hoang told him he was living in Fairfax County. In light of his residency, Simmons attempted to transfer him to Fairfax County’s parole district, and briefly succeeded—until a Fairfax County parole officer told Simmons he wouldn’t supervise Hoang because he considered the original sentence illegal, too. Simmons resumed responsibility for Hoang.

It’s not clear whether Hoang knew his post-release sentence was illegal. His lawyer, George Fabre, declined to comment for this article. If Hoang didn’t know, however, he must have started to wonder why the Commonwealth seemed unwilling to send him to prison for what court records describe as repeated failed drug tests and other alleged violations.

Many of the alleged violations are noted in Hoang’s court files. In August 2009, the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland notified Simmons that Hoang had threatened someone in the county.

“The victims did not want the authorities to prosecute the defendant and wanted the incident to remain confidential because they feared retaliation by the defendant,” the report notes.

In a separate incident later that year, Hoang’s girlfriend filed for a temporary protective against him in Baltimore. Days later, while trying to bail Viet Hoang out of jail in Arlington, Nam was arrested on a warrant for grand theft auto from Maryland, filed because Hoang allegedly stole his girlfriend’s car. According to the protective order, Hoang had visited his girlfriend at a Baltimore nail salon, demanded money, and threatened to come back and shoot her.

The protective order was temporary and the grand theft auto charge was dropped after his girlfriend changed her mind.

After Hoang’s arrest and grand theft auto charge, according to Simmons, he wrote to Virginia’s Parole Board, asking them to review Hoang’s case. The Parole Board asked Simmons to fax them Hoang’s 2005 sentence. He never heard from them again.

Hoang also tested positive for crack cocaine, according to one of Simmons’ reports. In late September 2009, seven months after his release from ICE custody, Hoang allegedly told Simmons that he developed an addiction after his girlfriend gave him a cigarette laced with crack. The same girlfriend, Hoang told Simmons, according to court records, was pressuring him to commit crimes to support their addiction.

Court records show no attempt to return Hoang to prison. Instead, he tested positive for the drug three more times.  Hoang also ran into legal trouble when he returned to the Eden Center, violating a ban on him visiting the mall after the original September 2003 shooting incident.

Despite the trouble they frequently got into, Simmons said both Hoang brothers were responsible charges.

“They were very respectful, great guys, but they just had a past,” Simmons says. Both men always met their post-release supervision reporting duties, according to Simmons.

But as scrupulous as he was with his supervision schedule, court documents say Nam Hoang had less concern for his own family. When Hoang’s half-sister, a student in the Fairfax County Public Schools system, started missing consecutive days of school, a guidance counselor contacted Simmons in early January 2010. Simmons investigated.

According to Simmons’s report, the Hoang family told him that Hoang was intimidating them.

“They are in fear for their lives,” Simmons wrote. According to Simmons, Hoang used verbal abuse to intimidate his family members, including his sister.

Finally, Simmons requested a hearing to change Hoang’s legal status.

“It appears that the defendant is a menace in the community and the fact that he’s abusing crack cocaine seriously raises the need for corrective actions,” Simmons wrote in his hearing request.

Judge William T. Newman agreed to a hearing. Instead of being punished at the hearing, Hoang was released from post-release supervision on February 26, 2010—just a month after he had last allegedly tested positive for crack. Judge Newman declined to comment for this story, saying it would be inappropriate for a sitting judge.

According to Simmons, the court was worried that Hoang could press charges over his original sentence for attempted murder, which included what Simmons says was a botched order for post-release supervision.

“They didn’t want any lawsuits,” Simmons says. “Basically, it was an illegal court order.”

According to Simmons, Hoang’s case had already been bounced between the court and the parole board, neither of which wanted to take responsibility.

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After the February 2010 hearing, Hoang continued living with his family in a home in Franconia, on the 6300 block of Fenton Court. Around 9 p.m. on January 4, 2011, Fairfax County Police Department officers executed a search warrant on the house, allegedly found marijuana and cocaine, and arrested Hoang. Hoang was charged with possessing marijuana and cocaine with intent to distribute.

Hoang posted the $5,000 bail on February 16. But the bail bond company may have trouble recovering the money—Hoang didn't appear at a preliminary hearing on March 7, and the court issued a warrant for his arrest. His next hearing is scheduled for April 13.

When Kingstowne Patch told Simmons about the charges against Hoang, he says he was surprised Hoang wasn’t charged with a more serious crime.

“I knew his case was kind of high risk,” Simmons says.

Still, to Simmons, Franconia’s loss is Arlington’s gain.

“Hopefully he stays out in Fairfax, so I don’t have to deal with [the Hoang twins],” Simmons says.