A murder trial tinged with international controversy that begins this week will determine whether a U.S. Border Patrol agent was justified in shooting an illegal immigrant near the Mexican border.
Jury selection will start Tuesday in federal court in the case of Agent Nicholas Corbett, who is charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide in the Jan. 12, 2007, death of Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera.
Corbett’s lawyers contend that he acted lawfully in self-defense after being threatened; prosecutors contend the shooting wasn’t justified.
The case stands in contrast to that of El Paso, Texas, agents and convicted felons Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, who are serving prison terms after a jury convicted them in 2006 of assault, obstruction of justice and civil rights violations in the wounding of a drug smuggler.
Border Patrol brass in El Paso supported that prosecution, after an internal investigation determined the agents had acted inappropriately.
Robert Gilbert, who became chief of the El Paso sector a few months before the agents’ federal trial, said after the case that Ramos’ and Compean’s actions would not overshadow the agency’s “long-standing tradition of honor, service and integrity to the country.”
Now the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector chief, Gilbert has attended Corbett’s court proceedings in a show of support for the agent.
Corbett, 40, an agent since 2003, encountered Dominguez, 22, of Puebla, Mexico, his two brothers and one of the brother’s girlfriend as they tried to return to Mexico to evade capture.
Corbett cut off their exit with his SUV, then jumped out to take them into custody.
The witnesses told investigators and later testified at an August preliminary hearing that Francisco Dominguez had started kneeling when Corbett came up behind him, hit him on the side of his neck and pushed him downward. They said the gun was in Corbett’s left hand, draped over Dominguez’s left shoulder, and the weapon discharged.
Corbett declined to talk to investigators but told other Border Patrol agents, including a supervisor, that he had shot after Dominguez raised his arm to throw a rock at him.
The witnesses insisted Dominguez was shot from behind without provocation.
In deciding to bring charges last spring, prosecutors concluded that autopsy and forensic results supported the witnesses’ testimony, with the bullet fired between 3 inches and 2 1/2 feet from Dominguez.
The Arizona shooting created some stir on Web blogs but nothing approaching the intensity over the Texas case, which caused a furor among conservative lawmakers, on Internet blogs and talk radio, including calls for presidential pardons.
The Dominguez shooting elicited protests from Mexican President Felipe Calderon and a diplomatic note demanding an exhaustive investigation, as well as from human rights activists. Foes of illegal immigration counterattacked.
A Border Patrol agents’ union official leveled accusations of a tainted investigation, contending that Mexican consular officials received premature access to interview witnesses to the shooting before all had been interviewed by case investigators.
The consulate and the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department denied the charges.
“We’re prepared to present our evidence to the jury and we will live with whatever verdict they return. That’s all you can do in a case like this,” said prosecutor Ed Rheinheimer.
Picking a jury, he said, “will be very important to eliminate the possibility of having a juror who has an agenda from either side.”
“We’re ready for the trial,” added special prosecutor Grant Woods, a former Arizona attorney general. “We look forward to the jury hearing all the evidence in this case.”
Defense lawyers did not return phone several calls seeking comment.
The Border Action Network, a southern Arizona human rights organization, plans a weeklong memorial outside the federal courthouse “to demand policy changes to prevent further death and injustice along the border.”
“In terms of the bigger picture, we see this as another example of the fact that the current anti-immigrant climate and focus on stepped-up enforcement inevitably results in these types of abuses,” said Alessandra Soler Meetze (pronounced Metz), executive director of the ACLU of Arizona.
Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, whose members report illegal entries to the Border Patrol along sections of the Mexican border, said his group hopes “all law enforcement agents get a fair trial.”
“It’s a very unfortunate situation for this young man and certainly for the family who lost their loved one,” he said. “Hopefully, at least the Border Patrol union and the Border Patrol bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., are going to make sure that they provide the best defense that they can.”
Jurors would be allowed to convict on only one charge. Because a gun was used, the state also has alleged the dangerous nature of the offense, and a conviction would require mandatory prison time.
A second-degree murder conviction would draw a sentence of 10 to 22 years, manslaughter seven to 21 years and negligent homicide four to eight years.
YUMA, Az — A Border Patrol officer was run over and killed on Saturday as he attempted to lay a spike strip to stop a speeding Hummer in the sand dunes of Imperial County.
Authorities in El Centro and Yuma, Ariz. said the agent was killed in the line of duty along the Mexican border in the Algodones sand dunes, 110 miles east of San Diego. Federal agents from San Diego rushed to the area to oversee the investigation.
The California Highway Patrol closed freeway ramps at Grey’s Well Road, between Yuma and El Centro, but traffic on Interstate 8 itself was not affected.
Border Patrol agents in Yuma said the agent was deploying a spike strip to puncture the tires on two vehicles fleeing federal officers when he was run over and killed.
Sources reported that the two vehicles, the Hummer that hit the agent and an accompanying Ford F-150 pickup truck, were being chased west on I-8 from a checkpoint near Yuma. As the cars exited the freeway at Grey’s Well Road, the agent was struck.The vehicles sped south through sand dunes towards Mexico.
Interstate 8 is less than one mile north of Baja California at that location, and the two vehicles were last seen speeding towards Mexico federal Highway 2 east of Mexicali.
The sand dunes are a popular off-road vehicle playground, and the border fence in the area is frequently overrun by some of them.
TIJUANA, Mexico, – Hurling himself over a steel fence into the no-man’s-land between Mexico and California, an undocumented migrant sprints across a narrow strip lit by harsh arc lights and watched over by video cameras on tall posts.
Before he can shin up a second barrier of tall concrete pillars topped with seismic sensors and a layer of steel mesh more than an arm’s-length wide, U.S. Border Patrol agents close in fast and arrest him .
That scene is repeated dozens of times each day along a 14-mile stretch of state-of-the-art fencing separating San Diego, California, from Tijuana, Mexico, that has become a model for no-nonsense policing of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Inspired by the San Diego fence, the U.S. House Representatives voted in December to build a similar barrier to stop illegal immigrants across one-third of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, seen as a weak spot in homeland security since the Sept. 11 attacks.
It is the most controversial proposal in a debate in the U.S. Congress over immigration reform that has split Republicans and sparked protests by Hispanic immigrants in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit.
Although the San Diego fence is seen as a success in cutting illegal immigration, the plan for the bigger barrier is struggling to win further support in Congress.
Critics compare it to the Berlin Wall and say it goes against the American spirit of openness, sending the wrong message to the rest of the world about the United States.
Calif. Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, who authored the fence plan and estimates it would cost about $2 billion, points to a sharp drop in the number of immigrants nabbed h it would most likely be ineffective, while the Mexican government slammed it as a disgrace.
Despite the greater chances of either dying in the desert or being caught while pushing north through the San Diego sector, immigrants at a hostel in Tijuana said they would not be put off from their quest for a better life in the United States.
“Whatever they put there they’ll just keep on going over, around or under it,” Hugo Uriel, an illegal immigrant from Mexico’s Michoacan state said.
“Finding a better life for your family is a powerful incentive,” he said at a Tijuana hostel after being caught in the United States and sent back to Mexico.
The fence plan envisages a double barrier made from former U.S. military aircraft landing mats stood on their side on the south and a high-tech steel and concrete wall to the north.
It would run for 22 miles across California, and 361 miles over the sun-blasted Arizona desert, a strip crossed by half of the 1.18 million immigrants nabbed on the border last year.
A remaining 315 miles of fence is proposed to seal three strips between Columbus, New Mexico and Brownsville, Texas, two of them along stretches of the Rio Grande River that became notorious last year as routes for Central American and Brazilian immigrants.
Border police in San Diego warn the fence has also strengthened the resolve of some die-hard immigrants and traffickers who have become wilier and more confrontational.
Attacks by frustrated traffickers on agents are soaring, with 119 gun, knife and rock assaults reported between Oct. 1 and the end of February, more than double the number noted in the same period a year ago, the Border Patrol said.
In an attempt to break through the heavily policed line, traffickers also scooped out four tunnels under the stretch of border this year alone, most of them shallow “gopher holes” used to smuggle undocumented immigrants northward.
Customs and Border Protection sources said immigrant traffickers have also crammed clients into hidden vehicle compartments, including seat backs and even gas tanks, to try and sneak them through the local ports of entry in the sector.
Immigrant welfare groups are also critical of the proposal, and point to the fact that past policing crackdowns such as ”Operation Gatekeeper” in the San Diego sector in 1994 only succeeded in rerouting the flow of immigrants to more remote and dangerous areas of the border.
“Nothing has actually succeeded in slowing down the number of migrants crossing the U.S. border,” said Rev. Robin Hoover, president of Tucson-based welfare group Humane Borders.
“The fence is just another gimmick that will just expose migrants to greater danger,” he added.
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