Free Republic

So Peg Lautenschlager wants to take over the Chai Vang case. We wish the Wisconsin attorney general good luck. She'll need it. We're inclined to agree with the cynics who think this is more about politics than prosecutorial discretion. After all, it's certainly no coincidence that Lautenschlager will be up for re-election in 2006. It's also important to note that Lautenschlager is trying to live down a DWI conviction. Adding insult to injury, she was in a state-owned vehicle earlier this year when she was pulled over and refused to submit to a sobriety test. Clearly, a victory in the...

A Minnesota truck driver serving life in prison for murdering six northern Wisconsin deer hunters last fall is no longer a suspect in the unsolved slaying of a deer hunter in Clark County four years ago, an investigator said Tuesday. Chai Soua Vang was working as a truck driver in the Twin Cities on the day James Southworth was shot, said Kerry Kirn, a detective with the Clark County Sheriff's Department. Southworth, 37, of Medford, was shot twice in the back near his tree stand on family land near Neillsville on Nov. 23, 2001, during the nine-day deer hunting season....

(Each was honored for ignoring the danger and rushing to help as a St. Paul hunter attacked in 2004. Two paid with their lives.) When deer hunter Chai Soua Vang, of St. Paul, opened fire on a large party of other hunters in northern Wisconsin in 2004, some of the people he killed, wounded and endangered were trying to save the lives of their friends and family members, according to official accounts of the melee. Five members of the party were recognized Thursday -- three posthumously -- with medals from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. The Pittsburgh-based fund carries out...

MADISON, WI (AP) -- The man serving life prison sentences for killing six deer hunters in northern Wisconsin in 2004 disagrees with his attorney that there are no grounds to appeal his convictions, according to court documents filed Friday. Chai Soua Vang, 37, mailed eight pages of handwritten documents from a prison in Iowa to the state Court of Appeals responding to his attorney's conclusion about the case, deputy clerk Sheelah Guild said. "There is no prove (sic) beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Vang intentionally killed those victims with the intent to kill," Vang wrote, repeating his trial testimony...

Associated Press SALT LAKE CITY Voters removed a 3rd District judge who reduced the sentence of a sex offender and also caught the wrath of deer hunters and gun owners for an anti-hunting diatribe from the bench. In Salt Lake, Tooele and Summit counties, 54 percent of voters Tuesday said Judge Leslie Lewis should not be retained, a rare defeat for a sitting jurist. Lewis, a judge since 1991, was out of town and unavailable for comment, court spokeswoman Nancy Volmer said Wednesday. “I just don’t like the way this one was done,” said Greg Skordas, one of 40 lawyers...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A gunshot that killed a 19-year-old deer hunter was self-inflicted, state investigators determined. Steve Burchard, of Newark, died Saturday in Licking County after he was shot in the head with his rifle. No one else was involved in the shooting, the Division of Wildlife of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources said Monday. Investigators still were trying to determine exactly what happened. Burchard had been hunting with three others near St. Louisville, about 45 miles northeast of Columbus. He did not meet with the others at the end of the day, and they eventually found his body....

HAYWARD, WIS. -- Chai Soua Vang, who killed six Wisconsin deer hunters and wounded two others last fall, was sentenced this afternoon to life in prison with no possibility of release. Vang will serve six life sentences, plus five years for each, consecutively, said Judge Norman Yackel, in Sawyer County Circuit Court in Hayward. Yackel said the sentences are the harshest provided by the state and were justified by the gravity of the offense, Vang's character as well as a need to protect the community and deter future crime.