How is official misconduct – official acts that violate the law – discovered and punished in Vietnam? This is an important issue for the legitimacy of the legal system, and, more broadly, the legitimacy of the Vietnamese Party and state. This chapter goes back to an earlier era in Vietnamese legal reform to explore the dynamics of response to official misconduct – here, police murder – by exploring the legal responses to the killing of a young civilian in Hanoi in the early 1990s. By looking at this individual but well-known case, we may be able to understand the treatment of official misconduct as well as some of the dynamics between law and an increasingly active press at that point in the reform process.

My goal here is to explore one instance – albeit a famous instance – in which official misconduct demanded redress, and the ways in which the Vietnamese written media sought to respond to a variety of conflicting signals from reporters, editors, audiences, and the various sectors of the political, security and legal apparatus in covering a well-known murder case in Hanoi. In this case, at least for some of the Vietnamese newspapers discussed here, editorial life existed in a complex and shifting state between autonomy and censorship, a state in which the highly complex informal politics of response to state, security and legal officials and to the public (rather than slavish response to intensive external guidance from the state) played a major role in press coverage (Palmos 1995; Tho 1992; Hiebert 1992; Heng 1992; Templer 1999; Thai 1996; Asia Watch 1987; AsiaWatch 1993).