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 News from Around the Americas | April 2007 
Border Cop Charged with Murdering Migrant
 Reuters
| | A National Guard soldier assisting the U.S. Border Patrol, stands watch on a ridge above Nogales, Ariz., at the Mexico border. (www.army.mil) |
A U.S. Border Patrol agent was charged with murder on Monday for shooting dead a Mexican immigrant last January in a case that prompted condemnation and increased tensions with Mexico.
The Cochise County Attorney's office filed four charges including first degree murder against agent Nicholas Corbett.
The charges alleged that Corbett unlawfully shot Mexican Francisco Dominguez-Rivera shortly after he crossed a stretch of desert border between Douglas and Naco on January 12.
Following the shooting Mexico's Foreign Ministry complained of "disproportionate violence," and instructed the Mexican embassy in Washington to investigate the circumstances.
Last year, border police nabbed some 1.1 million undocumented immigrants crossing over the border from Mexico, and recorded a soaring number of attacks on agents.
The Border Patrol had said that Corbett shot the immigrant in self defense after he had been threatened with a rock.
Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer said physical and other evidence corroborated statements by three witnesses that suggested there was no imminent danger to the agent's life.
"Based on the extensive investigation presented to this office by the Cochise County Sheriff's Department, as well as the physical evidence itself, we must come to the unfortunate but inescapable conclusion that this shooting was not legally justified," Rheinheimer said in a prepared statement.
"We have concluded that the evidence shows that at the time he was shot, Mr. Dominguez-Rivera presented no threat to Agent Corbett and Agent Corbett did not act in reasonable apprehension of imminent death or serious physical injury."
Last year two Border Patrol agents were prosecuted in Texas for shooting an unarmed Mexican drug smuggler in the buttocks.
They were later convicted and jailed by a court for more than ten years, becoming a cause celebre among some conservatives and anti-illegal immigration hardliners. |
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