A federal jury deliberated less than a day before finding a U.S. Border Patrol agent not guilty of using excessive force and choking an unauthorized immigrant in an encounter inside the Imperial Beach station nearly two years ago.
Agent Luis Fonseca gasped, then wept and shared a long embrace with his lawyer, Stuart Adams, after the jury in U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff’s courtroom announced its verdict just after 1 p.m. Friday. Outside of court Fonseca, who joined the agency almost six years ago, said he hoped he would go back to his job. He has been on unpaid leave since the allegations surfaced in August 2011.
“It’s a big relief,” said Fonseca. “I love my country, I love my job at the Border Patrol.”
The weeklong trial was a rare event. The last time the government prosecuted an on-duty Border Patrol agent in San Diego for excessive force was in 2002. That trial also ended, quickly, with an acquittal.
U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said in a statement she was disappointed with the verdict but respects the jury’s decision. “We believe it is our responsibility to stand up for the rights of everyone and felt this was an important case to bring,” she said. “The U.S. Attorney’s office will always elect to bring such cases when we believe the evidence is sufficient to do so, no matter how tough the case may be.”
The case against Fonseca centered on a video clip from a ceiling-mounted camera inside the station. Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego said the video, from July 26, 2011, showed Fonseca approaching Adolfo Ceja Escobar, who had been arrested with two other men trying to illegally enter the country.
There is no audio, and the quality of the image is not great. It shows Fonseca kneeing Ceja three times and then hunching over him as Ceja kneels on the floor. The angle is from above and behind the two men, so what happened next was a subject of great dispute in the trial.
Fonseca appears to raise his arms, his elbows out and at shoulder level of Ceja. After a few seconds, Ceja’s body sags and then he slumps to the ground, his body jerking several times.
Prosecutors Timothy Coughlin and Jill Burkhardt said Fonseca clutched Ceja around the neck with his hands, squeezing and choking him nearly unconscious and causing a seizure-like response. They said that was unreasonable and excessive force on Ceja.
But Adams argued that Ceja simply faked the fainting and the seizure. Moreover, he said, Fonseca followed Border Patrol training for using force when people in the agency’s custody don’t comply with orders.
Adams showed jurors a longer segment of the video that he said revealed how Ceja repeatedly disobeyed orders to keep his hands placed on a wall and not speak to other immigrants.
Such defiance were signs, Adams said, that Ceja could be dangerous. Agents are trained to act forcefully when they see such things, before they escalate.
But Coughlin countered that choking Ceja, even though he was not complying, was simply excessive and a bullying tactic. He said chokin is a kind of lethal force, and agents can only use such force when they are also confronted with someone using lethal force on them.
A juror said after the trial that most of the panel did not find Ceja’s story — he testified over parts of three days — believable. Juror David Bales also said many on the panel believed that the video was inconclusive.
There was another video camera in the station that could have shown the encounter between the two men more from the front. The video of the second camera was not available because by the time investigators realized it could be useful, it had been recorded over. The cameras are set to automatically record over images about every two weeks.
Ceja did not complain about the incident until a few days later, when he was caught again trying to enter the U.S., this time using false documents. He told a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer of his encounter, which triggered an investigation that led to Fonseca’s indictment. Adams argued that Ceja was the only one to blame, from the moment on July 26 when he attempted to flee Border Patrol agents, who caught and arrested him.
“He started this whole thing by running, he started this whole thing by not being compliant,” Adams told the jury during arguments on Thursday.
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