Oakland detective facing bribery charges accuses former DA of anti-Asian bias

An OPD homicide investigator facing perjury and bribery charges over his handling of a 15-year-old Oakland murder case has accused former District Attorney Pamela Price of racial bias.

Late last month, Phong Tran’s attorney, Andrew Ganz, filed a court motion in Tran’s criminal case, alleging that Price’s decision to prosecute him may have been racially motivated. Ganz is asking a state judge to order the DA’s office — now run by Ursula Jones Dickson — to hand over a range of records and data that he argues could show that Tran was singled out because he is Asian.

A veteran Oakland homicide investigator, Tran was charged in 2023 with perjury and bribery after the star witness in a 2016 murder trial recanted, saying Tran had paid her thousands of dollars before she gave court testimony identifying two men who were then convicted in the killing. Her admission, in 2021, that she had not testified truthfully helped set both men free from prison the next year. Since then, other homicide cases investigated by Tran have been reexamined, and at least one other man’s conviction has been overturned because of the detective’s misconduct.

Price ran for DA in 2022 on a platform that emphasized police accountability, and deputies in her Public Accountability Unit filed charges against Tran in April 2023, two months after she took office. Tran has pleaded not guilty.

The criminal case has faced delays over the past three years due to Price’s recall in 2024, the change in DA leadership, and the refusal of the witness whom Tran paid — an Oakland woman named Aisha Weber — to cooperate.

The accusations of racial bias introduce a new wrinkle, which prosecutors argue could risk delaying trial until next year.

Judge Scott Patton will decide soon whether Tran’s accusations are supported by enough evidence for him to order the DA’s office to hand over relevant data and records.

Tran says charges against him were influenced by racial animus

Tran’s attorney laid out the new allegations in a court filing known as a Racial Justice Act motion for discovery, which was presented to Judge Patton during a closed court hearing on Oct. 2. Patton, who is overseeing Tran’s case, sealed the motion and related filings, so many of the details of what Tran is alleging are not yet public.

Tran’s attorney, Ganz, did not respond to interview requests from The Oaklandside. The DA’s office declined to comment for this story.

Some of Tran’s accusations are described in a recent court filing by Darby Williams, the deputy district attorney who has been prosecuting Tran’s case since December.

Williams quoted sections of Tran’s motion which ask for court-ordered disclosure of “data relevant to prior accusations of anti-Asian discrimination by former District Attorney Pamela Price” and “data pertaining to how the Price administration approached individuals of other racial and ethnic groups who may have committed crimes similar to the ones for which Tran currently stands accused.”

Tran’s motion, Williams wrote, also mentioned “allegations made by others that the Price administration discriminated against them as employees or hired others that were not Asian and were believed inappropriate.”

This appears to be a reference to lawsuits filed by two Asian American former employees of the DA’s office. The first was a lawsuit filed by Patricia Lee, who worked as a public information officer in Price’s office until she was terminated in 2024. Her lawsuit, filed that June against the county, alleged that Price fired her in part because she was Asian. Lee accused Price of having “racial animus toward people of East Asian descent.”

The second was a lawsuit filed against the county in October 2024 by Craig Chew, who worked as chief inspector in the DA’s office under Nancy O’Malley and was replaced by Price when she took over in early 2023. Chew alleged that Price “demonstrated stereotypical thinking in regard to race” and fired him because he was Asian, replacing him with an African American candidate.

Tran’s motion, according to Williams’ filing, also refers to an incident in which “an infant of Asian heritage was murdered by two young Black defendants and the Price administration decided to strike special allegations that would have, if imposed, made the two twenty-something defendants ineligible for parole.”

That appears to be a reference to the Jasper Wu case. Wu, a 23-month-old toddler, was killed in Oakland by a stray bullet on I-880 in 2021. The next year, the Alameda County prosecutor’s office, then under the leadership of O’Malley, charged two San Francisco men, Trevor Green, 22, and Ivory Bivens, 24, with Wu’s murder. Added to the charges were special circumstances that would have sent Green and Bivens to prison for life without the chance of parole, if convicted.

When Price assumed leadership of the DA’s office in 2023, she issued a policy barring prosecutors from alleging special circumstances or seeking sentence enhancements without approval from supervisors.

That policy infuriated some veteran prosecutors, and speculation that it would influence charging decisions in the Jasper Wu case ignited a firestorm of media coverage. In June 2023, Price did drop the special circumstance allegations against Green and Bivens, meaning they would face up to 25 years in prison but be eligible for parole after that, if convicted.

Price says her entire career is about racial justice

Former DA Price told The Oaklandside last week that her office’s decision to charge Tran was based on strong evidence of wrongdoing, and that the charging decision was a fulfillment of her campaign promises to voters.

“I was elected on a platform of holding police officers accountable,” Price said. “My team looked at the evidence and made a recommendation, and I approved the prosecution.”

She dismissed Tran’s claim that she and her administration were biased against Asians. “I’ve been an advocate for racial justice all of my life,” Price said.

Price said Tran’s misconduct first emerged in 2022 — before she was DA — when the murder convictions of Giovanni Douglas and Cartier Hunter were overturned by a state judge. (Both men are currently suing the Oakland Police Department for civil rights violations.) Then-DA O’Malley and her deputies alerted the Oakland Police Department to that development, which sparked an internal affairs investigation of Tran. After the allegations that Tran had bribed a witness were first reported in the press in early 2023, Price’s office decided to investigate and charge him.

Price also defended the way her office handled the Jasper Wu case, saying it was in line with new policies she had rolled out to reduce racial disparities in charging across the board. Enhancements and special circumstance allegations like the ones the defendants in the Wu case initially faced, Price said, had been used by prosecutors in thousands of cases in Alameda County, but they hadn’t been neutrally applied. Studies have found that California prosecutors were much more likely to use enhancements and special circumstances against Black defendants than defendants of other races.

Regarding Chew and Lee’s lawsuits against her and the county, Price said they were each settled.

According to public records, the county agreed to pay Lee $368,000 in compensation, $92,000 for lost wages and $338,000 to cover her attorney’s fees. The county paid Chew $133,000 in compensation, $14,000 for lost wages and $101,000 for attorney’s fees. In both cases, the county did not admit that Price or any county official was at fault.

The DA’s office says Tran has offered only ‘loose conjecture’

Tran’s accusation that Price had a “fixation with race, ethnicity, and nationality,” Williams argued in the court brief, is not supported by the “speculation fueled anecdotes” in his motion.

According to Williams, the more obvious answer to why Price charged Tran with felony perjury and bribery charges is that Price was motivated “to keep a campaign promise to investigate and charge police.”

Williams wrote that Tran hasn’t explained how his race was specifically considered by prosecutors when he was charged with perjury. And Williams said in her filing that Tran’s sealed pleadings to the court haven’t shown that Price’s administration disproportionately charged Asian people with crimes, including perjury.

She summed up Tran’s requests as “fishing expeditions.”

Tran’s latest motion stands to cause further delays, Williams wrote. According to Williams, the defense had said in January that it was considering a Racial Justice Act motion, and the prosecution urged Ganz to file it. By March, the defense hadn’t filed the motion or formally notified the court that it intended to, and the case was set to go to trial.

“This eleventh-hour filing will now build in a delay of potentially months depending on the scope of the Court’s grant for discovery,” Williams wrote.

The next hearing in the case is Oct. 29.

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