On July 1, 2015, 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle, while walking with her father and a friend along Pier 14 in the Embarcadero district of San Francisco, was shot by Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, who claimed a gun had fired accidentally while he was picking it up; he claimed he had found the gun moments before, wrapped in cloth beneath the bench on which he was sitting. The shot ricocheted off the concrete deck of the pier striking the victim in the back. Steinle died two hours later in hospital as a result of her injuries. On November 30, 2017, after five days of deliberations, a jury acquitted Zarate of all murder and manslaughter charges, but convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The shooting elicited controversy and political debate over San Francisco's status as a sanctuary city, as Zarate is a Mexican national unlawfully residing in the United States. Donald Trump, at the time a presidential candidate, cited Zarate in support of his proposal to deport criminal illegal immigrants living in the United States, and mentioned Steinle during his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Video Shooting of Kathryn Steinle
Shooting
Garcia Zarate told ABC station KGO-TV in a jailhouse interview that he started wandering on Pier 14, a tourist attraction area at the Embarcadero waterfront district, Wednesday, July 1, after taking sleeping pills he found in a dumpster. He said he then picked up a gun that he found. Zarate fired one shot from a .40-caliber SIG Sauer P239 handgun with a seven-cartridge magazine. One bullet struck Steinle in the back and pierced her aorta. She collapsed to the pavement while screaming to her father, who was accompanying her at the pier, for help. Her father and others performed CPR on Kathryn before paramedics arrived and took her to an ambulance. She died two hours later at San Francisco General Hospital.
Zarate was arrested about an hour after the shooting at Pier 40, about one mile (1.6 km) south of Pier 14 and divers from The San Francisco Police Department Underwater Recovery Unit found the gun in the bay alongside Pier 14, the next day. On July 5, 2015, investigators returned to the pier and found a point 12-15 feet (3.7-4.6 m) from Zarate's presumed location where a bullet had ricocheted off of the concrete. Following his arrest, Zarate was booked into San Francisco County Jail on suspicion of murder.
The gun used by Zarate had been stolen in downtown San Francisco from a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ranger's personal vehicle on June 27, 2015, according to the Bureau of Land Management. The ranger testified at trial that he had left the weapon holstered and unsecured in a backpack under the front seat of his personal vehicle while he went to dinner with his family. The car's window had been broken.
Maps Shooting of Kathryn Steinle
Victim
Kathryn Michelle "Kate" Steinle (December 13, 1982 - July 1, 2015) was originally from Pleasanton, California, and graduated from Amador Valley High School and earned a communications degree from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She was employed at Medtronic in San Francisco and was living on Beale Street, close to Pier 14, the site of the shooting. Her funeral was held at a winery in Pleasanton on July 9.
Perpetrator
José Inez García Zárate (or Juan Francisco López-Sánchez), of Guanajuato, Mexico, is an illegal immigrant who was deported from the U.S. a total of five times, most recently in 2009. He was on probation in Texas at the time of the shooting. He had seven felony convictions. When he was apprehended, Zarate was listed as 45 years old by police, but as 52 in jail records.
Zarate arrived in the U.S. sometime before 1991, the year he was convicted of his first drug charge in Arizona. In 1993, he was convicted three times in Washington state for felony heroin possession and manufacturing narcotics. Following another drug conviction and jail term, this time in Oregon, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) deported Zarate in June 1994. However, Zarate returned to the U.S. within two years and was convicted again of heroin possession in Washington state. He was deported for the second time in 1997.
On February 2, 1998, Zarate was deported for the third time, after reentering the U.S. through Arizona. United States Border Patrol caught him six days later at a border crossing, and a federal court sentenced Zarate to five years and three months in federal prison for unauthorized reentry. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), successor of the INS, deported Zarate in 2003 for his fourth deportation. However, he reentered the U.S. through the Texas border and got another federal prison sentence for reentry before being deported for the fifth time in June 2009.
Less than three months after his fifth deportation, Zarate was caught attempting to cross the border in Eagle Pass, Texas. He pleaded guilty to felony reentry; upon sentencing, a federal court recommended Zarate be placed in "a federal medical facility as soon as possible".
On March 26, 2015, at the request of the San Francisco Sheriff's Department (SFSD), United States Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had turned Zarate over to San Francisco authorities for an outstanding drug warrant. San Francisco officials transported Zarate to San Francisco County Jail on March 26, 2015, to face a 20-year-old felony charge of selling and possessing marijuana after Zarate completed his latest prison term in San Bernardino County for entering in the country without the proper documents.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had issued a detainer for Zarate requesting that he be kept in custody until immigration authorities could pick him up. However, as a sanctuary city, its "Due Process for All" ordinance restricted cooperation with ICE to cases only where the immigrant had both current violent felony charges and past violent felony convictions; therefore, San Francisco disregarded the detainer and released him. He was released from San Francisco County Jail on April 15, 2015, and had no outstanding warrants or judicial warrants, as confirmed by the San Francisco Sheriff's Department.
Legal proceedings
Garcia Zarate was formally charged with first-degree murder and possession of illegal narcotics on July 6. Zarate admitted in a KGO-TV interview that he committed the shooting but said he found the gun wrapped in a T-shirt under a bench after taking sleeping pills he found from a trash can. He first claimed that he was aiming at sea lions, then that the gun had fired while he was picking up the wrapped package, and that Steinle's shooting was accidental. During a pretrial hearing, a judge disallowed the interview to be used as evidence. Zarate pleaded not guilty to the charges, and was held on $5 million bail. Zarate's attorney, Matt Gonzalez, stated in court that the shooting was likely accidental.
On July 28, prosecutors filed an additional charge against Zarate: being a felon in possession of a firearm. On September 4, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Brendan Conroy stated that there was enough evidence to try Zarate. Initially charged with first-degree murder, Zarate was eventually tried for second-degree murder. If found guilty of the charges of second-degree murder, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and an enhancement of using a firearm, Zarate could have faced life in prison without the possibility of parole. The jury also had the option of deciding if he was guilty of involuntary manslaughter (where the death occurs without intent but "through the negligent or reckless actions of the defendant".
In August, a judge set December 2 as the date to assign the case to a judge for trial. Zarate's public defender said there were no discussions of a plea deal. However, the trial date set for December 2016 was postponed. Zarate returned to court July 14, 2017. The trial was postponed again on July 25, but the defendant asserted his right to a speedy trial, meaning that the trial was required to begin within 60 days.
The trial began October 23, 2017, with opening statements and a brief testimony from Steinle's father. On subsequent days, jurors heard testimonies from eyewitnesses of the shooting, local investigators and the BLM ranger whose stolen gun was used in the crime. Police revealed how they had lied to Zarate in order to motivate him to confess to the shooting by saying that they had more evidence than had actually been collected at the time. The prosecution contended he brought the stolen gun to the crime scene while the defense claimed the weapon was found under a Pier 14 seat.
The defense called its first witness, the crime lab supervisor, after the prosecution rested its case after two weeks of testimony. Their case was that the shooting was accidental and occurred when Zarate picked up the newly found gun. Experts regarding video enhancement and Spanish translation were heard to bolster the claim of an accidental shooting and incomplete investigation.
A key point of contention was the ease with which the weapon could have been fired accidentally. A supervising criminologist at the San Francisco Police Department crime lab testified that the gun was in excellent condition and would not have fired without someone pulling the trigger. The defense emphasized that the Sig Sauer pistol has no external safety mechanism to prevent accidental firing, and pointed to a record of even police trained in the use of Sig Sauer pistols having made accidental discharges. As examined by the criminologist, it was placed in single-action mode (where the hammer is cocked), rather than double-action mode (where a single pull of the trigger both cocks and releases the hammer). While it is typical for a gun that has been fired to be in single-action mode, a gun in single-action mode also requires less trigger pressure to fire. The defense argued that this made it more plausible that Zarate could have pulled the trigger accidentally while picking up or unwrapping the bundled gun. The BLM ranger testified that he always left the pistol in double-action mode, but that he typically loaded it in single-action mode, and couldn't definitively say that he had returned it to double-action mode before it was stolen. The defense rested its case after four days.
Prior to closing arguments, Judge James Feng agreed to a request by the prosecutor Diana Garcia to instruct the jury in first-degree murder as well as second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. "The jury will be instructed on multiple theories of homicide," said District Attorney's Office spokesman Alex Bastian. Despite the controversy, the defendant's immigration status was not considered in the case.
Jury deliberations began after 12 days of testimony, dozens of witnesses and two days of closing arguments on November 21, 2017.
On November 30, 2017, after five days of deliberations, the jury acquitted Zarate of all murder and manslaughter charges, but convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The Department of Justice unsealed a federal arrest warrant for Zarate following his trial. The charges include felon in possession of a firearm, involuntary manslaughter, and assault with a deadly weapon. There is an existing federal detainer for Garcia Zarate to be transported to the Western District of Texas by U.S. Marshals.
Investigation
The gun used in the shooting was confirmed by forensic crime laboratory technicians to be the same one stolen from a federal agent's car. The .40-caliber handgun had been taken from a U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ranger's car that was parked in downtown San Francisco, on June 27, 2015. The ranger was in San Francisco for an official government business trip. He testified at trial that he had left the weapon holstered and unsecured in a backpack under the front seat of his personal vehicle while he went to dinner with his family. The ranger immediately reported the theft to San Francisco police, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Crime Information Center. Police issued a citywide crime alert but did not call in CSI technicians to examine the scene.
Ballistics experts for both the prosecution and defense agreed with the investigators finding that, after Zarate fired the gun, the bullet ricocheted off the pavement 12-15 feet (3.7-4.6 m) away from him before traveling another 78 feet (24 m) and striking Steinle.
Family lawsuit
In September 2015, the Steinle family announced their intention to file a lawsuit against the City of San Francisco, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Bureau of Land Management, alleging complicity and negligence in the death of their daughter. On January 7, 2017, Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero dismissed the family's claims against San Francisco and former Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. The magistrate also dismissed their claim against ICE, but he ruled that the lawsuit accusing the Bureau of Land Management of negligence can proceed.
Reaction
The killing sparked criticism and political debate over San Francisco's sanctuary city policy, which aims to strengthen community safety by disallowing local officials from questioning a resident's immigration status, thus enabling local victims of crime to report without fear of deportation. Multiple Republican presidential candidates, including Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, made statements blaming the immigration policy for Steinle's death; Trump further called for the need for a secure border wall. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated that the U.S. would be safer if Republican lawmakers had approved comprehensive immigration reform backed by President Barack Obama.
2016 U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined California Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, in condemning the policy. Clinton said, "The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported ... So I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on." That same week, Feinstein penned a public letter to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee that stated, "The tragic death of Ms. Steinle could have been avoided if the Sheriff's Department had notified ICE prior to the release of Mr. Sanchez, which would have allowed ICE to remove him from the country."
Local and state reaction
San Francisco County Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi received criticism by anti-illegal immigration activist groups, including Californians for Population Stabilization, and a range of politicians, including San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and California U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, for Zarate's release from custody before the shooting. Lee stated the sanctuary city ordinance allows the sheriff to coordinate with federal immigration and ICE agents. On July 7, Feinstein stated that the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department should have notified ICE before Zarate was released, so that he could be deported from the county. In a press conference held on July 10, Mirkarimi blamed federal prison and immigration officials for the series of events that led up to the release of Zarate.
Ross Mirkarimi lost his bid for re-election to Vicki Hennessy on November 3, 2015, receiving 38% of the vote.
Political reactions
The Donald Trump presidential campaign for the 2016 election released the political advertisement "Act of Love", showing Garcia Zarate and criticizing rival Jeb Bush's policy on immigration. Later, when accepting the Republican nomination for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump mentioned Steinle's death as a rationale to deport illegal aliens in the United States. After the 2017 Presidential Inauguration, President Trump again mentioned Steinle and other victims of violent crime by illegals when creating the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office within ICE.
Kate's Law
In response to the controversy, Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Matt Salmon introduced H.R. 3011, the Establishing Mandatory Minimums for Illegal Reentry Act of 2015, also known as Kate's Law. No vote was ever held. In July 2015, however, the House did pass the Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act (H.R. 3009), a related bill that is often confused with Kate's Law.
In July 2016, a Senate version of the law (S. 2193) was filibustered with the motion to invoke cloture receiving 55-42 votes mostly by Senate Republicans, therefore insufficient to defeat the filibuster. The Senate also voted on another bill often confused with Kate's Law, the Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act (S. 3100). The bill failed to proceed to a final vote in the Senate.
On June 23, 2017, Representative Bob Goodlatte reintroduced two bills, Kate's Law (H.R. 3004) and No Sanctuary for Criminals, an anti-sanctuary city policy (H.R. 3003), into the House which passed on June 29 and proceeded to the Senate.
See also
- Office of Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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