LogFAQs > #891392268

darkjedilink posted...

Unless you're arguing that 12 people legitimately believed his bullshit story of finding a t-shirt on the pier that just happened to have a loaded firearm with the safety off and it just 'went off,' your argument doesn't hold water.

They don't have to believe his story, they just have to have reasonable doubt about the prosecution's story. Which, again, involved claiming he attempted a 100-foot bank shot

During preliminary hearings and in public statements about the case, prosecutor Diana Garcia has argued that Garcia Zarate did shoot Steinle intentionally. This was no accident, she told the court in September 2015. He had in his hands an instrument of death and he used it. She suggested that Garcia Zarate had executed a skip shot in which he was aiming the gun at the victim or the area of the victim, and the bullet skipped off the cement of the pier and hit the victim in the back. The prosecutor added that Steinle was his target, and that Garcia Zarate was playing his own version of Russian roulette. (The district attorneys office would not discuss the case with me on the record.)

Note also: the gun was stolen loaded and is noted for going off easily :

On June 27, 2015, two months after Garcia Zarate was released from custody, a .40-caliber SIG Sauer semi-automatic pistol was stolen from a car belonging to a Bureau of Land Management ranger. The gun was allegedly left loaded and unsecureda violation of agency policyin a backpack in the car, which was broken into in downtown San Francisco. Garcia Zarate says that on the day of the shooting he found the pistol wrapped in a T-shirt or rag, and that the trigger went off when he picked it up. He has not been charged with stealing that gun, and his lawyer says the prosecution hasnt presented any evidence that he did. Regardless, it is undeniable that Jose Ines Garcia Zarate picked up that pistol on July 1, 2015, and that a bullet fired from the gun struck and killed Kate Steinle.
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The SIG Sauer weapon that killed Steinle is a favorite of law enforcement on account of its quick-shooting capacity. If Mr. [Garcia Zarate] encountered this weapon when it was cocked and loaded [in whats known as single-action mode] its pretty easy for this thing to just go off, ballistics expert James Norris told me. In an op-ed for the San Francisco Examiner last month, Gonzalez listed dozens of cases in which law enforcement officers have accidentally discharged a SIG Sauer. In 2014, a federal air marshal in New Jersey accidentally shot himself. In 2015 in Pennsylvania, a state trooper and firearms instructor accidentally killed another trooper during safety training. This year in Michigan, a sheriffs deputy accidentally shot a schoolteacher in the neck.

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kin to all that throbs