MANHATTAN (CN) - A New York federal appeals court on Wednesday affirmed twin life prison sentences for David Thai, the former leader of the notorious Vietnamese street gang known as Born To Kill who terrorized lower Manhattan for several years until his arrest in 1991.

Once dubbed a "scourge of Chinatown," Thai asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a lower court's dismissal of his third request for compassionate release from incarceration due to declining health and terminal illness, including cardiac issues and MSA, formerly known as Shy-Drager Syndrome.

Sentenced at age 36 to two concurrent terms of life imprisonment, in addition to concurrent terms of 10 and 20 years' imprisonment, Thai turns 70 at the end of the month.

During oral arguments before the Second Circuit earlier in January, his attorney said he is "near death now," due to debilitating and terminal illness, and should have his sentence reduced under the First Step Act because he no longer poses a danger to the public.

A three-judge panel for the Second Circuit was not persuaded to overturn Thai's prison sentence imposed in 1992 by a Brooklyn federal judge, citing the lower court's emphasis on the lateness of Thai's contrition and "the extremely violent nature of Thai's conduct as the leader of a gang," which occurred in Chinatown's Canal Street area in lower Manhattan, just blocks away from the Second Circuit's courthouse building on Centre Street.

"Importantly, the district court not only noted the lateness of the remorse, but rather also emphasized that, 'even if sincere, his remorse fails to negate the immense violence perpetrated throughout New York under his leadership that precipitated his sentence,'" the panel wrote in its unsigned summary order.

"Indeed, the district court, referencing the [Federal Sentencing Statute] factors that it analyzed in its April 2020 order denying his first compassionate release motion, explained that it continued to 'maintain that 'Thai merited the life sentence he received' for the violence he inflicted personally and through his leadership of the 'Born to Kill' gang,'" the appeals judges wrote.

Also known as the Canal Street Boys, Born to Kill was mostly comprised of Cantonese-speaking, first-generation Vietnamese immigrants and refugees who had previously joined established Chinese-American gangs in neighborhood, such as the Flying Dragons and the Ghost Shadows, before splintering off into their own violent rival organization.

Prosecutors argued against Thai's compassionate release, focusing on acts of grave violence ordered by Thai while he was leader of Born to Kill, including the execution-style murder of a robbery victim who had cooperated with the police, which occurred in front of the victim's 12-year-old nephew.

"As the founder and leader of the gang, Thai cynically recruited young men to join and, over a period of years, directed a campaign of violent crime that resulted in death and serious injury," the Department of Justice wrote in its appeals brief. "The nature and circumstances of the offenses of which he was convicted-comprising more than a dozen crimes, including racketeering, conspiracy to murder and armed robbery are among the most serious contemplated by our criminal justice system."

Under the compassionate release provision, courts can modify criminal sentences in certain cases. Before 2018, the Bureau of Prisons had to file a motion as a prerequisite for such consideration, but Congress expanded a federal sentencing statute in the First Step Act to eliminate that requirement.

Thai's court-appointed defense attorney, Murray Singer, argued on appeal that Congress had contemplated the availability of such compassionate release, "even in cases with conspiracy to murder," when the statute was passed. He cited other federal cases where defendants, convicted of acts of gang violence and sentenced to life in prison, were nonetheless granted compassionate release.

Thai's defense posited that the judges in those similar cases had determined the decades in prison already served to be sufficient but not greater than necessary to serve the purposes of federal sentencing statute.

If released from prison, Thai had planned to move in with his brother and sister-in-law in Texas, the state with the second-largest population of Vietnamese-Americans in the United States, after California.

The three-judge panel that heard Thai's appeal was composed of U.S. Circuit Judge John Walker, a George H.W. Bush appointee; U.S. Circuit Judge Joseph Bianco, a George W. Bush appointee; and U.S. Circuit Judge Amalya Kearse, a Jimmy Carter appointee.

Source: Courthouse News Service