How appropriate for left-wing San Francisco that the only guilty verdict for the five-times-deported Mexican illegal alien who shot and killed a 32-year-old American woman on a pier is on a gun charge.
Is that what horrified the jury: That someone might have a gun?
Isn’t what he did with it the problem?
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate shot Kate Steinle in the back on July 1, 2015. He claims he found the stolen gun under a bench and that it accidentally went off.
On that basis, apparently, a jury Thursday acquitted him of murder and manslaughter.
The verdict is shocking. But not as shocking as the government policies that led to the crime. Zarate had been convicted of multiple felonies in the United States and deported five times, and should have been deported a sixth.
Why wasn’t he? When Zarate was released from jail, local authorities made no call to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which wanted him.
Why?
Because of the sanctuary city policy San Francisco had — and still has.
John Diaz, editorial page editor for The San Francisco Chronicle, spoke with Kate Steinle’s family at length shortly before the verdict arrived. It’s a moving interview, and more on it in a moment. But here’s the money paragraph from Diaz’s article:
“The bottom line: An undocumented immigrant with Garcia Zarate’s exact criminal history still could be released from jail to the streets without a call to alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
It’s common for utopians to try to make social change through poorly-thought-out prescriptions that prove catastrophic. But here is something altogether different: Causing a catastrophe with your foolish ideas and then continuing to keep them in place.
Kate Steinle’s family sympathizes with immigrants, even illegal immigrants, but can’t understand why illegal immigrants in jail are released in San Francisco without informing ICE. In that respect, the verdict in Zarate’s trial is irrelevant.
“This trial, for me, is kind of the least important part of the puzzle,” Kate’s brother, Brad Steinle, told Diaz. “The sequence of events that led up to this — and the fact that nothing has changed — is the most disheartening thing. It’s like Siegfried and Roy: You stick your head in a tiger’s mouth and you’re probably going to get bit at some point.”
Large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats in the United States prefer the non-rights of illegal aliens over the actual rights of American citizens. Many of them currently have the power to make their regrettable ideas stick.
Kate Steinle. Photo Courtesy of CNN. 
