Guest Post by Dan Cadman Via Doug Ross
By all accounts Kate Steinle was a vivacious young woman with a bright future ahead of her — until she met her death at the hands of an illegal alien while strolling on a San Francisco pier with her father, who witnessed the fatal shooting. The alien was quickly apprehended by police and identified as Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a citizen of Mexico with seven felony convictions and five prior deportations from the United States.
According to media outlets, Lopez-Sanchez was arrested by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who discovered that there was an outstanding warrant for a drug violation and did the right thing: They turned him over to the police for prosecution and filed a detainer requesting that they get him back at the conclusion of the charges. That’s where things went seriously wrong.
What did the district attorney’s office do? They promptly declined to prosecute and the warrant was dismissed. (I would bet good money that, whether they admit it or not, the reason they wanted to drop the charges is because they figured the subject could just be dumped back on the federal government saving them time and headaches while compounding someone else’s.)
Meanwhile, Lopez-Sanchez had been booked into the San Francisco County Jail. What did they do? Refuse to honor the detainer filed by the agents who had given them the subject to prosecute in the first place, simply releasing him instead to the street, where he wandered around until he shot Ms. Steinle to death.
