To the struggling second wave of immigrants from South Korea, on the dawn-to-midnight survival front in California’s inner cities, social justice was an elusive symbol. So was its criminal justice system — ignorant, indifferent and insensitive to the voiceless newcomers.

Long gone was the first wave of pioneer immigrants to America, whose many American-born and acculturated generations stayed aloof and distant from the emerging Koreatowns. And it was a matter of time before hapless and helpless newcomers would end up in jails and prisons.

In the 1970s, two Korean immigrants — separated by hundreds of miles — languished in California prisons for crimes they and growing numbers of supporters said they didn’t commit.

Chol Soo Lee, a child of San Francisco streets, had been a caged animal since he came to America at age 12 in 1967. He was waiting for execution in San Quentin’s gas chamber. A San Joaquin County jury condemned the 26-year-old immigrant to death for killing a neo-Nazi inmate while Lee was serving a life term for a 1973 Chinatown murder he said he didn’t commit. Lee claimed self-defense in the prison slaying case. The prison murder trial was forced on the defendant, although his Chinatown conviction — the very basis for his death penalty — had just been overthrown by a Sacramento judge on the grounds that Lee wasn’t given a fair trial.

The man portrayed in these sketches from the police (shown here) and an eyewitness has hair distinctly different than Kim’s

Meanwhile, Yung Min Kim, 45, a gentle scholar from an elite Korean family, was incarcerated in a Chino prison for allegedly savagely pounding a 72-year-old retired Navy admiral with a blackjack in 1975.

Both Lee and Kim, despite their disparate social backgrounds, shared the common fate of belonging to a powerless and voiceless minority, and of having fallen victim to mistaken identity through a biased identification process under an ethnocentric judicial system.

No material evidence was found linking the defendants to the crimes during their respective trials — each marked by conflicting and shifting descriptions of the suspects by white witnesses.

Eventually, Lee was released in 1983 from death row after a successful five-year campaign waged by a pan-Asian defense committee, a coalition of the second-wave Korean immigrants and the third-generation Asian American activists across the country.

But Yung Min Kim, a struggling doctoral candidate finishing up his dissertation at Indiana University, was convicted by an all-white jury of assault and first-degree burglary to commit the assault, both felonies.

Kim got stuck with the “burglar” label on appeal, when the appeals court dismissed the assault conviction but upheld the latter.

The man portrayed in these sketches from the police and an eyewitness (shown here) has hair distinctly different than Kim’s.

Immediately after the assault, the victim described his attacker as a man in his 20s, a Malay or a man of “mixed blood” with no accent, husky, no glasses and wearing a medallion. None of these qualities fit Kim, who was slender, in his 40s and had never worn a medallion or jewelry of any kind. Kim’s hair was parted on the left since he was a teenager, and he always wore glasses, including while driving because his license requires it.