The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a California Appeals court has overturned the gun conviction against the illegal immigrant who killed the young American woman, Kate Steinle, in 2015. Jose Inez Garcia Zarate had already been acquitted of murder charges in 2017 related to the case after the court ruled his actions as an accident.
BREAKING: A California court of appeal overturned the gun conviction against the undocumented immigrant acquitted by a San Francisco jury of murder in the shooting death of Kate Steinle on the city’s Pier 14 in 2015.https://t.co/M8TyGNCW8C
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) August 30, 2019
Zarate has been previously deported five times and was in the country illegally at the time of the incident. On Friday, the “1st District Court of Appeals...overturned a gun conviction against Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate because the judge failed to instruct the jury on one of his defenses.”
During the murder trial, the illegal immigrant claimed that he did not mean to kill Steinle, but “he unwittingly picked up the gun wrapped in a T-shirt and it fired accidentally.”
The death occurred on a pier on San Francisco’s waterfront. San Francisco considers itself a sanctuary city, meaning it refuses to comply with federal immigration law. It is likely that had it complied with federal law, and had America secured its borders, Steinle would still be alive since Zarate would not have been present in the United States.
Instead, it looks like justice for Steinle will go unanswered.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.