After the Steinle verdict: the decent, the losers, and the winners

Kate Steinle is still tragically dead. The 32 year old woman was just walking on the Embarcadero with her father in July 2015 when a bullet punctured her heart. The apparently dim-witted homeless man who randomly fired a found weapon was acquitted of responsibility for her killing by a San Francisco jury on Thursday, though held guilty of being a felon in possession of a gun.

And much of the country is up in arms. Rightwing Twitter wants a boycott of the City by the Bay. I kind of suspect they weren't coming here anyway, and wouldn't enjoy the place if they did, so that's not so worrisome. President Cheato is raving that this has something to do with San Francisco's welcome to immigrants and we should build his wall. Just as in the 2016 campaign, he's using other people's pain for his gain and inflaming racial fears.

I don't have any special knowledge of the case beyond what I read in the papers, but I have observations that I haven't seen brought together in most sources.

Devastated and decent
The Steinle family. The Chronicle recorded a short video, Mending the Heart, in which Steinle's father conveys his dignified determination not to participate in a blaming circus. He tries very hard to keep focus on the real harm, his daughter's death. And he stays away from vengeance-filled vituperation against the shooter or the city. (Kate's brother isn't so measured, but her father is the main spokesman.) Watch this soon at the link and weep; Chronicle links aren't always durable.

Losers

District Attorney George Gascon. Gascon's job is to decide who is to be charged with what crime in this city. He routinely throws the book at very young men rounded up on drug charges. He routinely exonerates police officers who shoot unarmed suspects. Presumably feeling political pressure to appear tough, he charged Jose Ines Garcia Zarate with intent to kill, including first degree murder. No wonder the charged didn't stick; the evidence showed Steinle was hit by a ricochet and Garcia Zarate seemed to lack both motive and capacity. If Gascon had dared to charge what the facts as found by the jury seemed to indicate, he might have gotten a conviction on some level of accidental manslaughter. But by going for broke, he chose to make a weak case unsustainable. (See Tim Redmond's devastating description of Gascon's failure here.)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It gets lost in the fog, but Garcia Zarate was on the street that fatal day because ICE neglected to get a warrant to pick him up from San Francisco County custody. San Francisco's "sanctuary" status means we don't just turn over inmates because someone at the Feds calls the jail and asks for a prisoner. Our law enforcement officers are required to follow the rules. In this country, it takes (or should take) a legal warrant to hand someone into custody. ICE didn't do its job and get the right judicial order; the SF Sheriff's Department merely followed the rules. Garcia Zarate became yet another homeless San Franciscan.

Winners

Matt Gonzalez. Gonzalez's past political career didn't make me a fan; a guy who would run as Ralph Nader's VP choice in the 2008 election demonstrated a complete lack of seriousness about U.S. politics. But in his role as lead public defender in this case, he did his job masterfully, enabling the jury to get beyond the noise and stick to the evidence. And his subsequent warning to the Cheato and company was timely:

“For those who might be critical of this verdict, there are a number of people that have commented on this case in the last couple of years — the attorney general of the United States, the president and vice president of the United States — let me just remind them that they are themselves are under investigation by a special prosecutor in Washington, D.C.,” Gonzalez said outside court.

“They may themselves soon avail themselves of the presumption of innocence and beyond a reasonable doubt standard,” Gonzalez said. “And I would ask them to reflect on that before they comment or disparage the result in this case.”

SFGate

The jury. Mostly criminal cases never get as far as being heard by a jury of fellow/sister citizens (much less a jury of their peers.) In 2012, 94 percent of state cases never reached trial. Most charges end in a plea deal with the defendant agreeing to guilt for some offense in order to receive a lesser sentence. But in the rare cases in which defendants do face a jury, ordinary people can prove thoughtful and discerning as I've written here from personal experience. Jurors often end up taking the momentous task they've been stuck with very conscientiously. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that a San Francisco jury made up of people who've likely seen quite a few individuals like Garcia Zarate on their streets needed more evidence than raw prejudice to make the man a deliberate murderer.

I have jury behavior on my mind as I'm on the hook for such service myself next week. I'm confident that nothing will come of it, as no attorney on either side would put me on a panel, but going through the motions is a welcome citizenship task.