Texas

TexasTowelie

(127,350 posts) Thu Mar 29, 2018, 04:01 AM Mar 2018

Courts: Police Can Shoot and Kill People As Long They Are Across the Border

Civil rights groups fear the courts are surrendering the judicial oversight necessary to rein in one of the nation’s largest police forces.

On June 7, 2010, while on patrol near the bridge connecting Juarez to El Paso, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa Jr. fired his gun into Mexico and struck Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca below his left eye, killing the unarmed 15 year old. Officials say that Mesa was “surrounded” by rock-throwing teenagers before he fired, though that’s not what was captured by grainy cell phone video that later surfaced. Mesa, standing on U.S. soil beneath the border crossing, can be seen dragging a young man with his left arm as others flee across the drainage culvert and back into Mexico. Hernández, standing on Mexican soil about 60 feet away from the agent, hides behind a concrete pillar. He peeks his head out and then folds to the ground after Mesa shoots.

As Border Patrol more than doubled boots on the ground over the past two decades, cross-border shootings have become more common. Like most of them, the official investigation into the shooting cleared Mesa and concluded he didn’t violate anyone’s rights “willfully and with the deliberate and specific intent to do something the law forbids.” Hernández’s parents then sought justice through the civil courts, but last week the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals again blocked their case. It was the second time in recent years that the court has determined the Constitution doesn’t protect you from a bullet fired by police standing in the United States if it kills you in Mexico.

Unless the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to rehear the case and revive the lawsuit, Bob Hilliard, the Corpus Christi attorney representing Hernández’s parents, told the Observer that Fifth Circuit judges have made it abundantly clear “that Sergio and others who are standing in Mexico may be gunned down for any reason by anyone with a badge standing feet away in the United States.”

Attorneys for Mesa and the federal government have argued that the border acts like a constitutional on-off switch. For the past several years, district and appellate court judges have dismissed the case not because Mesa’s actions were justified but rather due to a belief that constitutional protections end at the border. “The border is very real and very finite,” Randolph Ortega, Mesa’s attorney, told the U.S. Supreme Court last year. “It’s not elastic.”

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/border-patrol-agents-can-shoot-and-kill-people-as-long-they-are-across-the-border-mexico-police/