• March 28, 2024

Kate Steinle’s Killer Is Heading Back To Court And What He Is Demanding Will Turn Your Stomach

The illegal immigrant who murdered Kate Steinle is headed back to court.

And this time he wants his gun conviction tossed out.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The undocumented immigrant acquitted by a jury of murder in the shooting death of Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier, in a case that touched off a furor about immigration and sanctuary laws, has appealed his conviction for illegally possessing the fatal weapon, saying momentary and accidental possession of a gun is not a crime.

The November 2017 verdict in the case of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate showed that jurors believed he “did not commit a willful act in firing the gun — that it went off accidentally just as the defense contended,” Garcia Zarate’s lawyer, Cliff Gardner, said in a filing Friday with the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco.

Because Superior Court Judge Samuel Feng refused to instruct the jury that “momentary possession” of a gun is not a crime, the jury had no choice but to convict Garcia Zarate of illegal firearms possession by a previously convicted felon, Gardner said. He asked the court to overturn the conviction and order a new trial.

Garcia Zarate, 46, was sentenced to prison on the gun conviction and remains jailed to await deportation and possible federal prosecution.

Steinle, 32, was fatally wounded as she walked with her father on Pier 14 in July 2015. The bullet bounced off the pier’s concrete floor before striking her in the back. Garcia Zarate, who was holding the gun when it went off, had been released from federal prison four months earlier after serving 46 months for felony re-entry to the U.S. following a previous deportation to Mexico.Immigration officials had transferred him to San Francisco County Jail because of a local warrant alleging he had fled to avoid marijuana charges in 1995, but city prosecutors dropped that case, and the Sheriff’s Department then released Garcia Zarate despite a federal request to hold him for deportation. Then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said he interpreted the city’s sanctuary policy, which limited local cooperation with immigration enforcement, as barring him from notifying federal agents.

People are outraged.

https://twitter.com/dave26508211/status/1085514447018446848

Related post