In the summer of 2010, 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez and several friends were playing in a concrete culvert that separates El Paso, Texas, from Juarez, Mexico. The borderline between the United States and Mexico runs through the culvert with an 18-foot fence on the U.S. side. As Sergio and his friends played a game where they would run up the U.S. side of the culvert and then scamper back down, a patrol of U.S. border agents approached the boys, seizing one of the boys as he tried to run away. Sergio and the other boys ran back down the culvert embankment onto Mexican territory. After Sergio ran past Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa and toward a bridge pillar in the culvert, Mesa allegedly drew his firearm and shot Sergio in the head. At the time the shot was fired, the Border Patrol agent was in U.S. territory and the teenager was in Mexican territory. Soon after the shooting, the U.S. government issued a press release asserting that Mesa shot the 15-year-old in self-defense, however cellphone videos of the incident discredited the claim. When the U.S. government refused to prosecute Mesa or allow his extradition to Mexico to face charges, Sergio’s family filed a civil rights complaint in a federal district court in Texas.
In June 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Border Patrol agent was not immune from the lawsuit and remanded the case to a lower court. The lower court subsequently held that border patrol agents cannot be sued for injuries they inflict by shooting across the border. In their amicus brief supporting the Hernandez family, The Rutherford Institute and a coalition of human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Human Rights First, argued that Sergio’s presence in Mexico should not have been a factor in dismissing the excessive force lawsuit because international law supports allowing federal agents to be sued for using unwarranted deadly force against persons who are not on U.S. soil.
The Court’s ruling and the coalition’s amicus brief in Hernandez v. Mesa are available at www.rutherford.org.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
Source: https://bit.ly/2Pvf0Xb
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