If President Donald Trump withdraws support for the Paris climate change accord, will efforts in the U.S. to fight global warming dry up? Hardly. Dozens of states and many cities have policies intended to reduce emissions of greenhouses gases and deal with the effects of rising temperatures. And plans for more are in the works. In left-leaning locales, it’s good politics. Even in red states where resistance is strong to the idea that humans are causing the planet to heat up, flood prevention and renewable energy are considered smart business. Yet much remains uncertain about how a dramatic shift in federal policy would affect state and local initiatives — particularly if Congress slashes funding for them, as Trump wants.
The acquittal of an undocumented Mexican immigrant in the shooting death of a woman on a San Francisco pier apparently came down to a question of reasonable doubt, according to experts in criminal prosecution.
The jurors were evidently not convinced that the defendant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, acted with intent — a bar prosecutors needed to clear to convict him of the most serious charges, NBC News reported.
"As controversial and tragic as this case may be, and as political as it has become, my best guess is that this turned out to be a very conventional case in that ... the defense just cast doubt on the prosecution's theory," said Robert Weisberg, a criminal justice professor at Stanford Law School.
But some observers have questioned why Garcia Zarate was not at least convicted of involuntary manslaughter, a charge that is generally applied to crimes that are unlawful but unintentional.
