What To Know About The Murder Acquittal That Trump Is So Angry About
This morning, President Donald Trump tweeted angrily about the acquittal of undocumented Mexican immigrant Jose Ines Garcia Zarate for the murder of a 32-year-old white woman named Kate Steinle in San Francisco in July 2015.
Steinle's death was a favorite topic of Trump's on the campaign trail as a representation of the dangers of lax immigration policy. "Beautiful Kate in San Francisco was shot by an illegal, who was here five times and they couldn't do anything about it," he said at a public appearance a few weeks after her death. "And believe me, Mexico kept pushing him back because they didn't want him. Believe me, that's true."
However, the facts in the case don't match Trump's version of the story. As Slate's Jeremy Stahl explained in his investigation into the killing and its political aftermath this summer, all the evidence indicates that Zarate's killing of Steinle was unintentional.
Garcia Zarate says that on the day of the shooting he found the pistol wrapped in a T-shirt or rag, and that the trigger went off when he picked it up. He has not been charged with stealing that gun, and his lawyer says the prosecution hasn't presented any evidence that he did. Regardless, it is undeniable that Jose Ines Garcia Zarate picked up that pistol on July 1, 2015, and that a bullet fired from the gun struck and killed Kate Steinle.
Garcia Zarate did not know Kate Steinle. He had no known motive to murder her on the pier that day. Most significantly, the shot that struck Steinle in the back hadn't been aimed at her or anyone else.
[Slate]
Writing in conservative outlet RedState, Sarah Rumpf reached similar conclusions:
This seems to be a classic example of prosecutorial overreach.They pushed hard for a first degree murder verdict, which requires not only proving that the defendant killed the victim, but that he did it intentionally, and that it was premeditated (planned or thought out beforehand). Focusing their strategy on the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter would have allowed the prosecutors to simply argue that Garcia Zarate acted in a criminally negligent way that resulted in Steinle's death: he knew the object was a gun, he knew guns are dangerous, he should have known not to point it in the direction of people, etc.
[RedState]
What's more, Zarate didn't have a history of "being violent," as Trump claimed in this morning's tweets. Though he had accrued felony charges for drug possession and manufacturing and for illegally crossing the border, he did not have a history of violent crime.
Here are the facts: He didn't have a violent criminal past. The bullet ricocheted before hitting Steinle. There's no evidence he stole the gun. And federal officials missed their own chance to deport Garcia Zarate before they sent him to San Francisco…
"The entire narrative based on this case has been: 'We need to crack down on illegal immigration, we need more border security' … (but) he had not crossed the border illegally without being caught since the 1990s," [immigration expert David] Bier said. "The other common refrain is, 'This individual was a felon, he'd racked up multiple convictions for felonies in US' — and that is true, but none of them were violent crimes."
Despite being acquitted of manslaughter and murder, Zarate was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm, which carries a maximum sentence of three years. (Zarate has already spent two years in jail since his arrest.)
Trump wasn't the only member of the executive branch to criticize the not-guilty verdicts for murder and manslaughter. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also put out a post-acquittal statement attempting to connect Steinle's death to immigration policy, saying, "San Francisco's decision to protect criminal aliens led to the preventable and heartbreaking death of Kate Steinle."