Jurors deliberated for several days
before returning the verdict in the trial of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, who had
been deported five times and freed under sanctuary laws before the fatal
shooting. They convicted him on a single count of being a felon in possession
of a firearm. He has not been sentenced.
The verdict brought a swift response
from President Trump, who
had cited the slaying during his campaign to make his case for building a wall
across the U.S.-Mexico border and to punish cities he accused of not
cooperating with immigration enforcement.
“A disgraceful verdict in the Kate
Steinle case!” he tweeted Thursday. “No wonder the people of our Country are so
angry with Illegal Immigration.”
Reaction came quickly from other
quarters as well. U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions says he hopes the not guilty
verdict will make local officials “consider carefully the harm they are doing
to their citizens” by not cooperating with federal immigration officials.
And U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it will take custody of
Garcia Zarate once his case concludes.
During the trial, the defense called
an expert who testified that an unintentional ricochet shot killed Steinle.
They argued that the weapon went off in their client’s hands in what was a
tragic accident.
Garcia Zarate’s attorneys said he
had found the gun, which had been stolen a few days earlier from a federal
ranger’s nearby parked car.
Addressing the media outside the
courtroom after the verdict, Public Defender Matt Gonzalez offered condolences
to Steinle’s family.
“I hope that they do not interpret
this verdict as diminishing in any way the awful tragedy that occurred that
their family has suffered,” he said.
He later invoked members of the
Trump administration, including the president, Vice President Mike Pence and
Sessions.
“Let me just remind them that they
are themselves under investigation by a special prosecutor in Washington, D.C.,
and they may themselves soon avail themselves of the presumption of innocence
beyond a reasonable doubt standard,” Gonzalez said. “I would ask them to
reflect on that before they comment or disparage the result in this case.”
Steinle was shot in the back in July
2015 as she walked with her father on San Francisco’s Pier 14, near Embarcadero
and Mission streets. Less than an hour later, Garcia Zarate, a seven-time
felon, was arrested about a mile away from the shooting scene.
His previous brushes with the law
and release by law enforcement stoked angry arguments over so-called sanctuary
cities.
“This senseless and totally
preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another
example of why we must secure our border immediately,” Trump, a presidential
candidate at the time, said in a statement two days after Steinle died. “This
is an absolutely disgraceful situation, and I am the only one that can fix it.”
He told CNN that year: “This man, or
this animal, that shot that wonderful, that beautiful woman in San Francisco,
this guy was pushed back by Mexico. Mexico pushes back people across the border
that are criminals, that are drug dealers.”
The politicization didn’t go
unnoticed by Steinle’s family.
“For Donald Trump, we were just what
he needed — beautiful girl, San Francisco, illegal immigrant, arrested a
million times, a violent crime and yadda, yadda, yadda,” Liz Sullivan,
Steinle’s mother, told the San Francisco Chronicle, according to a report
published two months after the shooting. “We were the perfect storm for that
man.”
After the reading of the verdict,
one of Garcia Zarate’s attorneys, Francisco Ugarte, said the case had become
terribly politicized.
“From Day One, this case was used as
a means to foment hate, to foment division and to foment a program of mass deportation,”
he said. “It was used to catapult a presidency along that philosophy of hate of
others. And I believe today is a vindication for the rights of immigrants.”
In March 2015, when Garcia Zarate
finished his third federal prison term for felony reentry into the United
States from Mexico, he was turned over to San Francisco on a decades-old bench
warrant for alleged marijuana possession. Prosecutors declined to file charges.
ICE asked to be notified prior to
his release, but city officials did not comply because Garcia Zarate did not
meet their criteria, set in 2013, for turning over people to immigration
officials.
He was freed.
A harsh light fell on what role San
Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city had in the tragedy, with
several Republican presidential candidates at the time calling for the federal
government to punish such municipalities.
News outlets reported that politics and
the immigration debate were kept out of the courtroom during the trial. The
trial hinged on whether jurors believed the killing was intentional as opposed
to accidental, as the defense asserted.
The prosecutor presented evidence
that the pistol that killed Steinle required a firm pull of the trigger to fire
and that Garcia Zarate threw the firearm into San Francisco Bay after Steinle
fell, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A crime-scene inspector also
testified that the defendant had to have aimed the gun at Steinle for the
bullet to follow the path it did.
“It was a verdict we were not hoping
for,” San Francisco district attorney’s spokesman Alex Bastian said. “I know
that both sides fought very hard, but again, the jurors are the ones who make a
determination on a case and we will respect that decision.”
Laurie Levenson, a law professor at
Loyola Law School, said the verdict showed that the jury evaluated the case
based on the evidence presented in the courtroom, not on the political rhetoric
sounding outside.
“There’s a huge danger in us making
assumptions, based upon somebody’s immigration status, as to whether they’re
guilty of a serious crime like murder,” Levenson said. “That can very much
undermine the important presumption or innocence and undercut what our criminal
justice system is designed to do.”
In an exclusive interview with
the San Francisco Chronicle, Steinle’s father, Jim Steinle, and his family
shared their hope that the verdict would mark the end of their public profile.
The family did not attend court to
hear the jury’s decision.
“We’re just shocked — saddened and
shocked ... that’s about it,” he told the newspaper about the verdict. “There’s
no other way you can coin it. Justice was rendered, but it was not served.”
Kathryn Steinle’s brother, Brad,
went on to tell the newspaper that he was “stunned that they couldn’t even get
him on using the weapon.”
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