By Matthew Casey
It is hard to imagine U.S. law reaching the border with Mexico. After all, it is a place where drug trafficking, human smuggling, illegal entry, rape, murder and robbery take place everyday.
Today’s Top Story, written by Brady McCombs of the Arizona Daily Star, covers the start of U.S. Border Patrol agent Nicholas Corbett’s retrial for murder.
McCombs reports, “U.S. Border Patrol agent Nicholas Corbett is charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide in the Jan. 12, 2007, shooting of Francisco Javier Domínguez Rivera, a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Puebla, Mexico.”
Make no mistake, Border Patrol agents stare their own mortality in the face on a daily basis. So the irony of a murder charge against a Border Patrol agent coming out of such a dangerous and lawless place reminds me of Martin Sheen’s line after reading the classified dossier on Col. Walter E. Kurtz in the movie, “Apocalypse Now.”
“Charging someone with murder in this place is like passing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”
But prosecutors must feel the have a case since they are re-trying Corbett. And like the possible Supreme Court case concerning illegal immigrants that I commented on yesterday, Corbett should be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The burden of proof that he committed second-degree murder should fall solely on the shoulders of the prosecution. And if they cannot convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt, Corbett should be exonerated.
Hard line illegal immigrant activists will argue that it is a travesty that Corbett is standing trial for a second time because was Rivera an “illegal,” already in violation of the law.
This argument, along with breaking our own environmental and Bureau of Land Management laws to build a fence on the border goes directly to the heart of hypocrisy that illegal immigrant activists have displayed this year.

The message seems to be that illegal immigrants better not break U.S. laws, but it is alright for U.S. citizens to break them in order to keep immigrants out.
Again, I consider Corbett innocent until proven guilty. But if the jury does return a guilty verdict, he must face the same level of legal harshness illegal immigrants face.