Rotary Speakers April 20 : Steve Cooley and Robert Schirn
District Attorney Honorable Steve Cooley and Robert Schirn, career prosecutor and office historian. They were at the club to discuss their new book entitled Blue Lives Matter In The Line of Duty. It is a collection of facts, stories and lessons learned regarding the murders of various LAPD officers struck down in the line of duty. They highlighted the execution murder of Deputy David March in 2002, the pursuit of the murderer, Jorge Arroyo Garcia, and the efforts to bring Garcia to justice.
Garcia is a Mexican national who entered the U.S. illegally and had a criminal history and was convicted of narcotics trafficking and was arrested, jailed and deported twice. But he came back to the U.S. and shot Officer March at point blank range on April 29 of 2002 for being stopped for a traffic violation. He then fled to Mexico with the assistance of friends and when U.S. law enforcement tried to extradite him according to the laws of our extradition treaties, the Mexican authorities refused, stating that Mexican law does not have to comply if the U.S. is seeking the death penalty and that the suspect would be “rehabilitated” in Mexico.
A District Attorney website was created by Jan Mauarizi that told the stories of many officers who were murdered and with the help of Senator Feinstein, Assembly Bill 1432 was written and changed California law to state that it would be appropriate for Mexican or any other foreign national to be sentenced here because it assured that the death penalty would not be imposed on the criminals. It also would impose financial sanctions on the non-compliance of any country that refused to extradite a criminal back to the U.S. Mexico therefore changed its law, and Jorge Garcia was extradited back to the U.S. and eventually sentenced to life in prison without the hope of parole and is in a California state prison.