Mexicans Shot on Own Soil by US Border Patrol Given Hope in Legal Quest for Justice Television del Sur
go to original October 31, 2014

The site in Juarez, Mexico, where Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca was shot by a Border Patrol agent in 2010. (Singeli Agnew/Al Jazeera America)

...Considering that all of the CBP victims killed in Mexico since 2010 were Mexican nationals and not U.S. citizens, an ongoing legal quandary has been fought out in the courts. The outcome is one that lawyers are expecting to be decided by nothing less than the Supreme Court. The legal debacle boils down to whether non-U.S. citizens are entitled to constitutional rights which would afford them legal protections from the kind of harrowing fatal shootings that have become strikingly more common along the increasingly militarized U.S.-Mexico border.

Several years ago, the stroke of a district court judge's pen caused the families of the fatally shot victims to all but end their aspirations to realize any kind of legal justice. A key civil suit filed on behalf of the family Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, the 15-year-old who was fatally shot through the eye in Ciudad Juarez, was dismissed. Even though the decision had already admitted that an “excessive use of force” was at stake in the “wrongful taking of life,” the judge deferred to the reasoning that since, “the victim was not a U.S. citizen and incurred the injury in Mexico,” the case had to be dismissed.

Much to the surprise of the Mexican families of the victims, matters were drastically changed in June. A three judge panel of the 5th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals partially reversed the district court's ruling on the Hernandez Guereca case. The ruling stated that, “If ever a case could be said to present an official abuse of power so arbitrary as to shock the conscience, the Appellants have alleged it here.”

The recent decision, in effect, gave the right for the family of Sergio to sue the government for wrongful death. Suddenly and unexpectedly, new life was breathed into the families' aspirations for justice.

Read the whole story at Televisión del Sur

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