{"id":400932,"date":"2023-10-02T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=400932"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T14:00:00","slug":"Supreme-Court-affirms-Zhang-s-vandalism-conviction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/Supreme-Court-affirms-Zhang-s-vandalism-conviction\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court affirms Zhang&#8217;s vandalism conviction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Supreme Court affirmed the criminal conviction and sentence in <em>Commonwealth vs. Shabgua Zhang<\/em> last Sept. 29. The trial court found Zhang guilty of vandalism after he damaged the window of the Ports Police Office at the Francisco C. Ada\/Saipan International Airport with a rock.<\/p>\n<p>In affirming the conviction and sentence, the Supreme Court held that federal law 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 37, criminalizing certain violent conduct at international airports, does not prevent 6 CMC \u00a7 1805(a), criminalizing vandalism, from being enforced at the airport. It also held that 6 CMC \u00a7 1805(a) is a general intent crime, requiring that the trial court find the defendant \u201cintended to act\u201d when he violated the law.<\/p>\n<p>The court also denied Zhang\u2019s allegations that due process requires non-English speaking defendants to be provided with written translations of trial proceedings and court documents. The court clarified that due process does not require written translation, except in narrow circumstances to protect other constitutional rights at trial. Zhang\u2019s access to a court-qualified interpreter satisfied due process concerns. The Supreme Court affirms the conviction and sentence. <em><strong><em>(PR)<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/imgupload\/0e218a2ee82547e8f6804e2cac65bd48.jpg\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" \/><br \/>Supreme Court<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Supreme Court affirmed the criminal conviction and sentence in Commonwealth vs. Shabgua Zhang last&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}