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  1. #1
    Administrator Jean's Avatar
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    The Legal System Is Failing America When It Comes To Immigration

    Posted By Scott Greer On 2:21 PM 12/02/2017

    The illegal immigrant who fired the gun shot that killed Kate Steinle was able to beat a murder charge this week.

    Jose Garcia Zarate, a five-time deportee from Mexico and convicted felon, walked away with only a gun conviction after his legal team convinced the jury their client accidentally fired a gun three times and had no intent of killing anyone.

    The Steinle case has attracted national attention ever since her murder occurred in 2015 in the sanctuary city of San Francisco. The murder became the focal point in the debate over illegal immigration, showing the dangers of sanctuary city policies and how America can’t secure its borders from convicted felons with multiple deportations.

    Presidential candidate Donald Trump highlighted the murder several times on the campaign trail for why America needs to get tough on illegal immigration and eliminate sanctuary city policies.

    There was always a political element to the case, and that comes into play as to why a San Francisco jury sought fit to let Zarate go free without even an involuntary manslaughter charge.

    The prosecution team does warrant some of the blame for why that occurred. As RedState’s Sarah Rumpf argued, prosecutorial overreach trying to get a harder to prove first-degree murder charge bears some responsibility for the exoneration of Zarate for Kate’s killing.

    However, that factor can’t be solely responsible for the not guilty verdict for an illegal immigrant who somehow accidentally fired off a gun three times with no malicious intent in mind.

    San Francisco is a very liberal area and jury selection, according to Zarate’s defense team, was ensured to better benefit their client.

    “We are very pleased with the jury,” said Matt Gonzalez, the lead defense lawyer for Zarate, upon the completion of jury selection. “We have such great diversity built in in San Francisco and I think we have a jury that understands a lot of the concerns about the defendant receiving a fair trial.”

    That diversity was reflected in the jury consisting of three immigrants, at least one of whom’s primary language was Spanish. Potential jurors were quizzed about their thoughts on immigration, Latinos, guns and crime when being taken into consideration.

    Gonzalez also asked them how they would be fine with a verdict that came out contrary to President Trump’s wishes.

    While the judge presiding over the case urged the jury to leave aside their opinions on immigration and guns and focus on the facts, it was always hard for this case to escape from politics.

    Juries don’t always make the right decision, as anyone who is still upset by O.J. Simpson walking free can attest. The Steinle case seems to be emblematic for how America’s legal system seems incapable of adequately dealing with immigration issues.

    Zarate should’ve never been in the country to begin with, yet a San Francisco prison let him go free while under a sixth deportation order three months before Steinle’s murder. All thanks to sanctuary city policies.

    And this isn’t the only case where the legal system failed to find justice for illegal immigrant crime.

    In October, a Texas woman who lost her husband and two children to a car crash caused by an illegal immigrant expressed outrage that the man responsible only received a two-year sentence for the crime.

    In May, an Oregon circuit court overturned the conviction for an illegal immigrant who ran over and killed two girls playing in a leaf pile. The court bought the driver’s story that she didn’t realize she ran over anything as she drove away from the scene of the killing.

    That reversed conviction was not for vehicular homicide, but for the driver being found guilty of failing to perform her duties as a driver. The courts also managed to dismiss her deportation case over the incident.

    There’s also the example of San Francisco feeling embolden to continue to defend their sanctuary city policies, which give protection to illegal immigrants from deportation, after the Steinle verdict. A convicted felon who will apparently fire off guns without thinking isn’t exactly the poster boy you want for your policies, but San Fran seems comfortable with that association.

    Then again, the city should feel emboldened by how the courts continue to strike down the immigration orders of the president.

    Even more important than the individual cases of leniency given to illegal immigrant criminals is how the courts are presently shaping our country’s immigration policy.

    The White House has sought to punish jurisdictions that refuse to follow federal immigration law, yet courts have blocked the administration’s attempt to do so. In November, a U.S. district judge in California ruled the administration could not reduce federal funding to sanctuary cities because it “will cause them constitutional injuries.”

    Earlier the same month, another U.S. district court judge argued from the bench that the Department of Justice was wrong to say a city was failing to meet law enforcement requirements by giving protection to illegal aliens.

    Even more expansive than these court arguments on sanctuary cities is the legal system’s opinion on who the government can bar from entry into the country.

    Increasingly, the courts have inched towards the opinion that the federal government cannot restrict immigration from any part of the world. The various versions of Trump’s travel ban have been knocked down by the courts for the alleged reason they discriminate on the basis “of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.”

    In spite of the lengthy legal history of America restricting immigration based on national origin, judges have taken the initiative to make their own interpretation of migration policy. No matter how many times the Trump administration revises the executive order to prove it is not a Muslim ban, the courts still find it too discriminatory to take effect.

    By declaring that the government cannot restrict immigration based on national origin, judges are declaring any attempt to limit migration is inherently racist. This thinking operates under the delusion that there is some hidden open borders clause in the Constitution.

    We must take in any and all newcomers to the country because the Statue of Liberty poem says so. It doesn’t matter whether they come here legally or illegally, we must unquestionably welcome these immigrants or we are no longer America.
    Many Americans find this argument ridiculous, as a large percentage of our country supports immigration reduction. But courts don’t have to answer to the people, and judges have used their power to impose their own will on immigration policy.

    From the leniency shown to illegal alien criminals to preventing the president from enforcing immigration law, America’s legal system is proving it cannot be trusted to side with the interests of the nation’s citizens.

    Fortunately, Trump is reshaping the federal judiciary with conservative picks and one hopes thatrestores sanity to the courts soon.

    Until then, try not to be killed by an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city. A jury may find it’s more important to send a message to the president than find justice for your murder.

    http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/02/th...o-immigration/
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    his legal team convinced the jury their client accidentally fired a gun three times and had no intent of killing anyone.
    HUH???? Accidentally fired could happen once but 3x??? Didn't he also say he was shooting at the sea loins. Bad prosecutor, SanFran jury = injustice.

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    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


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    Quote Originally Posted by artist View Post
    HUH???? Accidentally fired could happen once but 3x??? Didn't he also say he was shooting at the sea loins. Bad prosecutor, SanFran jury = injustice.
    In our system, if you witness the crime, you cannot be on the jury. Only people who haven't a clue are selected. Then opposing attorneys do their show business routines to convince jurors to side with them. It all about show business. Justice happens by accident!

    I would hold the judge accountable in this case as he censored the evidence presented tot he jury. That is much of what happened in the O.J. jury as well, although Judge Ito was trying to steer the jury to a conviction, according to some annalists.

    I don't know what went on, but I would also hold the "expert witness" who testified that the gun had a hair trigger. He and the judge should go to jail as accessories to murder.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by artist View Post
    HUH???? Accidentally fired could happen once but 3x??? Didn't he also say he was shooting at the sea loins. Bad prosecutor, SanFran jury = injustice.
    Three times? That's the first time I've heard that. I thought the gun only went off one time. I'm sick and tired of hearing or reading different versions through the news media.

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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    Mark Steyn Blows the Lid Off the Truth About California Jury’s Ruling on Kate Steinle’s Killer

    By Joe Setyon
    December 1, 2017 at 7:29am

    During a Thursday appearance on Fox News, conservative commentator Mark Steyn strongly criticized the acquittal of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal immigrant who was charged in the 2015 murder of 32-year-old Kate Steinle.

    As The Western Journal reported, Zarate had been deported multiple times prior to the incident in which Steinle was killed. Still, due to the fact that San Francisco is a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, Zarate was allowed to go free, despite federal officials requesting that he be detained and then sent back to Mexico.

    Steyn called Zarate’s acquittal for the murder of Steinle a “miscarriage of justice,” noting that her killer will never see justice.

    “I think it is a miscarriage of justice in the profoundest sense in that Kate Steinle is dead because she went for a walk in a popular destination in her own city and her parents will never see anybody convicted for that crime,” he said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

    “There’s no dispute — I mean, this is slightly different from the O.J. (Simpson) case, where he pretended to look for the real killers for the last 20 years,” Steyn added.
    “There is no dispute that this guy actually fired the shot, or picked up the gun that then shot itself and that this gunshot killed Kate Steinle. And there’s no dispute either that this man should not have been in the country, that in fact he had been deported six times.”

    Zarate admitted that the shot that killed Steinle came from a gun he had been holding at the time. He said he found the firearm wrapped in a piece of cloth on a San Francisco pier and picked it up.

    Then, he said, the gun accidentally fired a bullet which ricocheted off the pier and hit Steinle in the back, according to KGO.
    But Steyn wasn’t buying it.

    “You don’t need to import foreigners to add to your murderer population,” he said. “This guy had a grade-two education. We’re told that the reason he got off is apparently because he’s too stupid to understand what the cops were saying to him. So he gave conflicting answers about treading on the gun, finding the gun, firing at sea lions.”

    “Why are we importing, and why is one political party, the entire bureaucracy and two-thirds of the remaining political party fetishizing and sentimentalizing immigrants who can’t speak the language with a grade-two education and setting up competing jurisdictions in this country that protect them at the expense of American citizens?”
    Steyn also argued the existence of sanctuary cities themselves, saying that the term itself doesn’t even make sense in context.

    “The very term sanctuary city is designed to shut down the argument,” he said. “Because who do you give sanctuary to? You give sanctuary to refugees, to those fleeing injustice.”
    “How can there be something called a sanctuary city,” he asked, if it is only being used as a safe haven for criminals?

    He explained that “the reason Donald Trump is president is because he declined to operate with those constraints.”
    “Most of the other Republican nominees two years ago,” he said, were “cowed by that kind of language, by ‘sanctuary city,’ and all the rest of it.”

    Trump himself responded to the verdict on Twitter, calling it “disgraceful.”

    “The Schumer/Pelosi Democrats are so weak on Crime that they will pay a big price in the 2018 and 2020 Elections,” he warned.

    https://www.westernjournalism.com/ma...einles-killer/

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    This dated USA story from t/15 is where the Daily Caller in the first post of this thread picked up the "3x fired gun".....

    Reports: Federal agent's gun used in S.F. pier shooting

    Michael Winter and Matthew Diebel, USA TODAY Published 10:53 a.m. ET July 7, 2015 | Updated 11:26 a.m. ET July 8, 2015

    A law enforcement official said the gun used in the slaying of a woman on a pier in San Francisco belonged to a federal agent. Local media reported the gun was stolen. But it was unclear how the suspect, an undocumented Mexican felon, got it. USA TODAY


    (Photo: Michael Macor, AP)

    SAN FRANCISCO — An undocumented Mexican felon deported five times but released from a city jail in April was ordered held Tuesday on $5 million bail after he pleaded not guilty to killing a young woman on San Francisco's scenic Embarcadero waterfront.
    ​Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez​ is charged with murder for allegedly shooting 32-year-old Kathryn "Kate" Steinle in the back on July 1 as she was walking with her father. He replied "not guilty" in English and Spanish, regardless of the questions the judge was asking him, according to news reports.

    His lawyer, Matt Gonzalez, the city's No. 2 public defender and a former member of the Board of Supervisors, said "very likely this was an accidental shooting."
    But in arguing against bail, Assistant District Attorney Diana Garcia called the killing "an act of random violence, shooting an innocent victim in the back."

    Citing sources, the San Francisco Chronicle, KGO-TV and KNTV-TV reported Tuesday night that the gun used in the shooting was stolen from a federal agent but that it was not clear how Lopez-Sanchez got it.
    Sources told the Chronicle that the weapon, a .40-caliber pistol, was the agent's personal firearm and had been stolen in a downtown auto burglary not long before the shooting.

    The case has divided law enforcement agencies, with federal immigration authorities lashing out at local police for having ignored a request to hold Lopez-Sanchez so that he could be deported. The slaying also has inflamed the politics of immigration and worked its way into the 2016 presidential campaign.

    The tragedy unfolded as Steinle, a medical device sales representative who recently moved to the city from nearby Pleasanton, was posing for photos at Pier 14 with her father, who had his arm around her.
    "There was a pop, and Kate went down," 68-year-old Jim Steinle told the San Francisco Chronicle. She died later at San Francisco General Hospital.
    Police said that the suspect never exchanged words with Steinle and that the shooting appears random.

    In an interview Sunday with KGO, Lopez-Sanchez confessed to the shooting but said it was an accident. He said that he found the gun, wrapped in a T-shirt, under a bench and that it went off three times when he picked it up.

    He said he then kicked the gun into San Francisco Bay and walked off, not knowing he had shot someone until police arrested him an hour later on a nearby street corner. He reportedly first told police he had been shooting at sea lions.

    Lopez-Sanchez also told an interviewer he was high on sleeping pills and marijuana at the time.

    Police were helped in their search for the suspect by photos taken by bystanders.
    The next day, a gun believed to have been used in the shooting was recovered from the water next to the pier by police dive teams using sonar equipment.
    Liz Sullivan and Jim Steinle, parents of Kathryn Steinle, talk to members of the media outside their home in Pleasanton, Calif., July 2, 2015. Kathryn Steinle was shot to death while with her father on a popular pedestrian pier on the San Francisco waterfront. (Photo: Lea Suzuki, San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

    San Francisco police said at the time of his arrest that Lopez-Sanchez was on "active probation" from Texas.
    He is listed by police as being 45, but jail records say he is 52.
    Speaking Spanish, Lopez-Sanchez told KGO he wants the harshest punishment so he can tell Steinle's parents in court that he "no longer wants to live," the station reported.

    Gillian Christensen, spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times, most recently in 2009, and has a criminal history dating to 1991 that includes seven nonviolent felony convictions, including four narcotics charges.

    He most recently served five years in a federal prison in Victorville, Calif., before being sent to San Francisco on March 26 for a 1995 warrant accusing him of selling $20 worth of marijuana. The charges were dropped the next day, and on April 15 Lopez-Sanchez was freed from the San Francisco County Jail, which is run by the sheriff.
    ICE officials requested that they be informed whenever the suspect was set to be released, but "the detainer was not honored," Christensen said.

    "ICE places detainers on aliens arrested on criminal charges to ensure dangerous criminals are not released from prisons or jails into our communities," she said. "The agency remains committed to working collaboratively with its law enforcement partners to ensure the public's safety."

    While acknowledging the immigration detainer request, the Sheriff's Department said that at the time Lopez-Sanchez was booked into the jail "there was no active (CE) warrant or judicial order of removal for him."

    Once the local charges were dropped, a 2013 city ordinance and Sheriff's Department policy on immigration detainers "deemed him ineligible for extended detention."

    ​Under the sheriff's policy, undocumented immigrants will be detained only if two requirements are met: a violent felony conviction within seven years, and an active violent felony charge that has advanced beyond a preliminary hearing.

    Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, a former city supervisor, defended releasing Lopez-Sanchez, who was held two weeks longer than required by the department's rules.

    ​"ICE knew that he had been deported five times," he said. "You would have thought he met a threshold that he required a court order or a warrant. They did not do that."

    Immigration "detainers," or "holds," have become controversial in recent years as some local law enforcement agencies have fought back against the federal government's requests to hold suspects based on their immigration status, arguing that the practice costs them money and damages their credibility with the communities they serve.

    In addition, federal courts have struck down cases involving "holds," stating that these detentions are not voluntary and violate the Fourth Amendment, according to civil rights organizations.

    During his interview with KGO-TV, Lopez-Sanchez said he came to San Francisco knowing it was a so-called sanctuary city, where he knew local policies helped shield him from immigration agents.

    San Francisco became a sanctuary city in 1989. A local ordinance prohibits city employees from helping ICE with immigration investigations or arrests "unless such help is required by federal or state law or a warrant." The move was intended to stand "firmly against repressive immigration proposals in Congress and immigration raids that separate families."

    And in 2013, the California State Assembly passed the Trust Act, which allows local agencies to treat ICE detainer requests as voluntary. Only people facing serious felonies must be held for ICE agents.

    After the law went into effect in 2014, California Attorney General Kamala Harris explained the state's problems with ICE holds.
    "When local law enforcement officials are seen as de facto immigration enforcers, it erodes the trust between our peace officers and the communities they serve," she wrote in a bulletin to state law enforcement agencies.

    Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told CNN that San Francisco was wrong to ignore the ICE detainer request and release Sanchez from custody.

    "The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported," Clinton said. "So I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on."

    Sen. Dianne Feinstein called on San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to start cooperating with federal immigration officials who want to deport felons such as Sanchez. Feinstein served as San Francisco mayor from 1978 to 1988.

    "I strongly believe that an undocumented individual, convicted of multiple felonies and with a detainer request from ICE, should not have been released," Feinstein said. "We should focus on deporting convicted criminals, not setting them loose on our streets."

    Contributing: USA TODAY's Doug Stanglin and Alan Gomez; The Associated Press

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...gned/29811735/
    Last edited by artist; 12-03-2017 at 02:00 PM.

  8. #8
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    Were any fingerprints taken from the agents car the GUN was stolen from?
    ILLEGAL ALIENS HAVE "BROKEN" OUR IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

    DO NOT REWARD THEM - DEPORT THEM ALL

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