This Just Gets Better And Better...

[Lord Jim]

AP source: Fed's gun used in San Francisco pier slaying

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The gun used in the seemingly random slaying of a woman on a San Francisco pier belonged to a federal agent, a law enforcement official briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity, said a police check of the weapon's serial number shows it belonged to a federal agent. The official declined to elaborate further.

The San Francisco Police Department, which is investigating the case, declined to comment.

The revelation was the latest dramatic twist in a tragic case that has become a new flashpoint in the country's debate over immigration policies.

The suspected gunman, Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, has been deported to his native Mexico five times and is suspected of living in the United States illegally when Kathryn Steinle, 32, was gunned down last week while on an evening stroll with her father along San Francisco's popular waterfront area.

Federal officials transferred Sanchez to San Francisco's jail in March to face a 20-year-old marijuana charge after Sanchez completed his latest prison term for illegally entering the country.

The San Francisco sheriff, citing the city's "sanctuary city" policy, released Sanchez in April after prosecutors dropped the drug charge, despite an Immigration and Customs Enforcement request to hold him for federal authorities so deportation proceedings could begin.

Sanchez pleaded not guilty Tuesday to first-degree murder.

He told two television stations who interviewed him in jail that he found the gun used in Steinle's killing wrapped in a shirt on the pedestrian pier she was walking on. Sanchez said the gun went off in his hands, and his public defender, Matt Gonzalez, said Tuesday that the San Francisco woman's death appeared accidental.

Regardless of the reason behind Steinle's death, the shooting has touched off criticism from leading Republican lawmakers — and from top Democrats, including both of California's U.S. senators.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told CNN that San Francisco was wrong to ignore the ICE detainer request and release Sanchez from custody.

"The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported," Clinton said. "So I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein called on San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to start cooperating with federal immigration officials who want to deport felons such as Sanchez. Feinstein served as San Francisco mayor from 1978 to 1988.

San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi has defended Sanchez's release and the city law requiring it to ignore ICE detainer requests.

http://news.yahoo.com/senators-feds-dep ... itics.html#

There was so much governmental ball dropping, mindless bureaucratic stupidity, and PCism gone crazy at so many levels that led to this tragedy, that even by the usual standards of gross government incompetence it beggars the imagination...

How fitting that it should turn out the gun used to murder this poor woman was stolen from yet another government employee who apparently had failed to properly secure it. (One report said it was stolen out of his car.)

ETA:

The shooting has fueled a national debate on "sanctuary cities" like San Francisco, which has a policy of noncooperation with federal immigration officials.

It also has outraged San Franciscans such as Frank Zona, a longtime resident who rode his bicycle to the pier earlier this week "to contemplate" the killing.

"It makes me sick," Zona said, as tourists walked onto the pier. "I'm a die-hard Democrat but this makes me want to vote for Donald Trump for (his stance on) immigration."

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts ... s-plea-san

What morons like Sheriff (and spouse abuser) Mirkarimi don't seem to get is that 100% avoidable, completely inexcusable tragedies like this do enormous harm to the cause of comprehensive immigration reform, (which presumably they support) and play right into the hands of demagogues like Trump.

[Big RR]

Jim--granted he was deported multiple times and had a criminal record, but as I understand it, he was never convicted or accused of any violent behavior. Sure, it is easy to postulate that if he was in ICE custody he would not have done whatever he is guilty of (be it deliberate or accidental) and the victim might well be alive today, but his deportation was not because of any concern about violent actions.

And San Francisco is not in the business of rounding up nonviolent persons for deportations because they overstayed their visas or entered illegally. Like it or not, San Francisco police have to deal with their communities, and being seen as an agent of immigration police does not help this, their primary mission. If a police force wants to get cooperation among the communities that contain a large number of illegals, they will have to tell them we are not here to deport you when they ask them to come in for questioning or ask them to help find a serious suspect. And the community in the city has made the decision that fostering that relationship does more to help their real mission (protection of their citizens) than does coming on and rounding up the illegals (the hospitals have found doing the same thing and treating persons without fear of deportation helps public health immensely).

Yes, something went wrong here; but he was never perceived as a threat to safety or (according to SF policy) he would have been remanded to ICE. People who are out on bail for nonviolent offenses sometimes commit murder or mayhem as well, but that does not mean bail should be denied to everyone to make us safer. The same is true for this policy.

And yes, it does play into the hands of opportunists like Trump, but I would venture o think only among those who support them because they want to rid us of this immigrant invasion.

[Joe Guy]

I think the guy is mentally ill. It's not unusual at all to see mentally ill people walking the streets in San Francisco.

[wesw]

so....

a mentally ill drug addict with a second grade education outwitted our Border Security 6 times?

Houston, we have a problem.....

[Econoline]

From vox.com:
A murder in San Francisco became about the city's immigration policy. Here's why that's wrong.
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8914805/imm ... tuary-city
Here's an excerpt:

But while it might be tempting to blame San Francisco, there's another way to look at this story: Sanchez was on the street because federal immigration officials didn't work to apprehend him. This isn't a case of a city being too soft on a criminal — it's a case of a federal agency not doing what it had to do to get a criminal into its custody.

Francisco Sanchez's criminal record stretches back to 1991, the year he entered the United States. He had already been deported five times when he was apprehended in Texas in 2009 trying to enter the United States yet again. He was convicted of illegal reentry — which is a federal felony — and sentenced to a term in federal prison.

Typically, when an unauthorized immigrant finishes up a federal prison term, he's handed over to ICE officials for deportation. But when Sanchez's term ended in March, there were two different requests in the system: the request from ICE officials, and an outstanding warrant from 1995 for a marijuana offense in San Francisco. For reasons that aren't yet clear, prison officials decided to send Sanchez to San Francisco to honor the 1995 warrant, instead of turning him over to immigration. Once he got there, prosecutors decided it wasn't worth charging him with a 20-year-old crime for pot.

Here's where the "sanctuary city" thing comes in. ICE had sent a request to the San Francisco Sheriff's Department asking them to hold Sanchez after they were done with him, so ICE could pick him up. But San Francisco has a policy that immigrants can only be held for federal immigration officials (after they'd otherwise be released) if there's a warrant or a court order. If there's no warrant, and just a request from ICE to detain the immigrant, San Francisco only honors the request if the immigrant is being held for serious crimes — and a 20-year-old marijuana arrest doesn't qualify. So once the charges against Sanchez were dropped, they let him go.

Four months later, in July, Sanchez was arrested for Steinle's murder.

No one is arguing that Francisco Sanchez shouldn't have been in federal custody and deported. The question is whose fault it is that he wasn't.

If you blame San Francisco for releasing Sanchez into the community, you also have to think about the federal officials at the Bureau of Prisons, who decided to ignore ICE's request for custody after Sanchez finished his prison term — and instead honored a 20-year-old warrant for marijuana in a city that is literally already preparing for California to legalize marijuana in 2016.

You also have to consider ICE's decision to issue a request to San Francisco's Sheriff's Department, rather than a warrant or a court order — even though San Francisco's policy has been on the books since last year. And you have to think about the three months after Sanchez was released by the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, when ICE didn't track him down.

After all, someone like Francisco Sanchez is basically Exhibit A for what ICE calls a "deportation priority." He has a criminal record; he's a "repeat immigration violator"; he was apprehended just after crossing the border in 2011, so he hasn't been settled in the US. But the fact of the matter is that ICE is more interested, most of the time, in picking up immigrants from local jails than in tracking them down.

(The article later states pretty much just what Big RR said in his second paragraph.)

[Lord Jim]

For reasons that aren't yet clear, prison officials decided to send Sanchez to San Francisco to honor the 1995 warrant

Ahh, but those reasons are now "clear":

Pier-slaying defendant came to S.F. at sheriff’s request

San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi has deflected blame in the release of a Mexican national now facing murder charges in the Pier 14 slaying by demanding to know why federal authorities returned him to San Francisco to face a 20-year-old marijuana charge in the first place.

The answer, it turns out, is that the Sheriff’s Department asked federal officials to do so.

Mirkarimi’s agency requested custody of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez as he was completing a 46-month stint in federal prison in March in San Bernardino County, according to a Sheriff’s Department letter obtained by The Chronicle. Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times to Mexico and had been imprisoned for illegally re-entering the U.S.

The federal Bureau of Prisons alerted the Sheriff’s Department in March that Lopez-Sanchez was going to be released. Mirkarimi’s agency, realizing that Lopez-Sanchez was wanted on a $5,000 bench warrant related to a 1995 marijuana possession-for-sale case, asked prison officials March 23 to hold him and to notify San Francisco authorities “when the subject is ready for our pick-up.”

“Also, please notify us if the hold cannot be placed or the named subject is released to another jurisdiction prior to our receipt,” said the letter, signed by Vic Gaerlan of the sheriff’s warrant bureau.


For the next three weeks, sources with knowledge of the matter told The Chronicle, sheriff’s deputies sought clarification from the department’s legal division on whether to hold Lopez-Sanchez so Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials could pick him up for possible deportation. ICE had requested that the city detain Lopez-Sanchez.

In the end, the legal division told deputies they had no basis to hold Lopez-Sanchez, and he was released April 15. He was arrested last week in the July 1 shooting death of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle on San Francisco’s waterfront, and has pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

Mirkarimi’s office did not immediately comment on the letter. It initially scheduled a news conference for Thursday to “set the record straight” on Lopez-Sanchez’s release but called it off late Wednesday “out of respect for Kate Steinle’s funeral services.”

In an interview Tuesday on KQED radio, the sheriff questioned why Lopez-Sanchez had been sent to the city.

“We’re trying to understand why ICE returned Sanchez to San Francisco on a 20-year-old marijuana possession charge in a city that really doesn’t even prosecute marijuana possession …[Because your own office requested it you friggin' asleep-at-the-switch mo-ron ] and knowing that he had been deported and illegally entered the country,” the sheriff said.

Freya Horne, legal counsel for the Sheriff’s Department, told The Chronicle on Tuesday that her office had dispatched a private transportation outfit to pick up Lopez-Sanchez.

“It seems kind of amazing that after all that time, he was brought back here for that purpose,” Horne said.

Joseph Russoniello, former U.S. attorney in San Francisco, said the city’s request to take custody of such an offender was “very unusual.” He said sheriff’s officials could have checked with local prosecutors about the case and opted not to intervene.

“They had the capability to examine the status of the file and determine whether or not to pursue the matter or move to cancel or withdraw the warrant,” he said.

The Sheriff’s Department letter came to light on the same day that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee attacked Mirkarimi, saying his decision to cut off even basic communication with federal immigration officials led to Lopez-Sanchez’s release.

Mirkarimi has said a 2013 city law designed to protect people without immigration status — a law signed by Lee — mandated the April release after the local charges against him were dropped.

But the mayor said the sheriff’s office could have satisfied both city and state law by simply picking up the phone and asking immigration agents to come over and pick up Lopez-Sanchez before the “serious, repeat” felon was set loose.

“I’ve sent that message over to the Sheriff’s Department regarding communications with the federal authorities,” Lee said at a news conference. “Do we need to educate somebody on how to pick up the phone?”

Lee said Mirkarimi “needs to read the entire ordinance” the mayor signed in 2013. The law prohibits most inmates suspected of being in the country illegally from being held for ICE after their scheduled jail release. The 48-hour holds are known as detainers.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Lee- ... 373929.php

I suppose you could still blame ICE...

I mean afterall, who would be stupid enough to honor a request from the San Francisco Sheriff's office?

[Big RR]

There appears to be some things missing here; it looks like San Francisco asked for him to be held at the federal facility pending transfer to them; there is no statement that he was transferred to their custody, but I am assuming he was. At the time the prison notified San Francisco, they would also have notified ICE who could have sought to have him released to its custody, but it does not seem that ICE did this.

There is no statement what happened based on the old bench warrant in San Francisco, but something must have transpired--we just don't know what. When that was handled, San Francisco law did not allow them to continue to hold him as he was not a violent felon. As the previous post said, ICE knew this, but did not serve a court order or a warrant on San Francisco, only a request to hold him for their pick up, one they could not legally honor. (see the previous post)--perhaps ICE was trying to make a point about the law?

We also do not know why he was released by the feds to the custody of the SFO sheriff rather than ICE; there may be some rule saying warrants (even old ones) must be dealt with first, but this is missing as well.

[Econoline]

As explained in the vox.com story I linked above: the Federal Bureau of Prisons had a request from ICE to hand over Sanchez for deportation *AND* a request from the SF Sheriff's Dept. The question is, why did the Bureau of Prisons honor the Sheriff's request *INSTEAD OF* the one from ICE? The follow-up question is, once ICE realized that the Bureau of Prisons had fucked up, why didn't they get a warrant or a court order (which they knew would be needed to have SF hold him more than 48 hours, and which they knew they could and should get for a repeat offender like Sanchez) instead of simply sending a "request"?

It looks to me like, between the Federal Bureau of Prisons, ICE, and the SF Sheriff's Dept., there's plenty of blame to go around and around and around in this incredible ballet of incompetence.

ETA: oops, Big RR beat me to it.