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The
45-year-old Mexican national, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, has been
held behind bars since his arrest in the July 2015 shooting
death of Kate Steinle, and was fully credited for the three-year
sentence, a spokesman for the San Francisco district attorney's
office said.
The San Francisco Sheriff's Department handed Garcia Zarate over
to U.S. Marshals on Friday on warrants stemming from federal gun
charged related to the Steinle incident, sheriff's department
spokeswoman Nancy Crowley said.
The completion of the three-year sentence, handed down by a San
Francisco judge, reflected both the time Garcia Zarate has been
held since his arrest and certain credits, the spokesman for the
district attorney's office, Alex Bastian, said.
A San Francisco Superior Court jury had found Garcia Zarate not
guilty of murder and manslaughter charges in connection with
Steinle's death. Jurors found him guilty of being a felon in
possession of a firearm.
Garcia Zarate had found the gun that killed Steinle. It
accidentally discharged, with the bullet ricocheting off the
ground at a crowded pier before striking the 32-year-old woman,
his defense attorneys have said.
Prosecutors claimed Garcia Zarate intentionally fired the gun,
but they said they accepted the jury's verdict.
Trump, who used the Steinle case as a rallying cry against the
policies of so-called sanctuary cities for immigrants during his
successful run for the presidency, has called the jury's verdict
"disgraceful."
Just days after he was acquitted in San Francisco, Garcia Zarate
was indicted on federal charges of being a felon in possession
of a firearm and being an illegal immigrant in possession of a
firearm.
The latest criminal counts against Zarate would not violate the
constitutional protection against double jeopardy, which
prohibits being tried twice on the same charges, because they
differed legally from the state court charges, a U.S. Department
of Justice spokesman said last month.
A representative for the Office of the Federal Public Defender
could not immediately be reached for comment.
Garcia Zarate faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison on
each charge if convicted.
Immigration agents have vowed to eventually deport Garcia
Zarate, who first came to the United States as a juvenile and
was deported multiple times.
(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Tom
Brown and Leslie Adler)
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