were caught and arrested almost immediately after the commission of their crime, pulled over by a police officer for driving without headlights on the way back to their victims' house to drop the wife off. Zheng's family had no money to hire a lawyer in his defense; they urged him to plead guilty because they were under the impression that it would bring him a more lenient sentence. Just aged 16 at the time, Zheng was tried as an adult and convicted of 16 felony counts including kidnap-robbery, and sentenced to seven years to life in prison. He had an interpreter and a public defender during his trial, but reportedly did not understand most of the legal language used and did not even realize he had been sentenced to life in prison until after the trial when he arrived at the California Youth Authority where he would begin to serve his sentence. His lawyer was supposed to ask the judge for a judicial recommendation against deportation but failed to do so, an omission which would bring later legal difficulties for Zheng. Imprisonment Zheng was later transferred to San Quentin State Prison, where he ended up serving as a model prisoner. He taught himself English through reading romance novels, and passed the GED in one attempt. In the 1990s, he entered into San Quentin's associate degree program, where he developed friendships with a number of the volunteers—mostly area university students—who acted as teachers in the program. He also held crime prevention workshops, giving lectures to at-risk immigrant youth who visited the prison in an effort to steer them away from a life of crime. His parents attempted to keep his imprisonment a secret; in an essay written some years later, Zheng recalled how his mother lied to relatives that he was busy with school when he failed to show up for his grandparents' funerals. For the first decade, he committed no major disciplinary infractions. He applied for parole for the first time in 1992. In 1998, at his fifth parole hearing, the parole board voted unanimously to recommend his release, making Zheng one of the fewer than one percent of those sentenced to life in California prisons to receive a positive recommendation for parole. However, then-governor of California Gray Davis returned the parole recommendation to the board for reconsideration, as he did with all but eight of the 340 parole recommendations