Tuesday, April 28, 2015

If you work for the Border Patrol


You can now stand within the boundaries of the United States and shoot Mexican citizens across the border within Mexico with impunity. So rules the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Curcuit.
A Border Patrol agent who shot and killed an unarmed Mexican teenager across a border fence in 2010 cannot be sued in United States by the teen’s family, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

Reversing a previous three-judge panel ruling by the same court, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously ruled Friday that family members of a Juarez, Mexico, teen did not have a right to sue Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa, who took the fatal shot across the border wall in 2010.

Mesa shot then-15-year-old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca in the face when he “poked his head out behind a pillar of a train trestle,” USA Today reported last year when a three-judge panel of the court ruled that the family of someone killed in Mexico had a right to sue in the U.S.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the federal appeals court ruled that “a 4th Amendment claim cannot be asserted by a Mexican citizen on Mexican soil with no significant connection to the United States … While there were differing rationales expressed in concurring opinions on whether Mesa violated Hernandez’s 5th Amendment rights, the court was unanimous in concluding that such rights could not have been clear to the agent. ‘No case law in 2010, when this episode occurred, reasonably warned Agent Mesa that his conduct violated the Fifth Amendment,’ the unsigned majority opinion said.”
Apparently it is a problem of standing, as in the victim was standing on the wrong side of the border. The Court's decision was also buttressed by the ancient legal principle of Lentus Stercore.

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