IN AMERICA POLITICS TRUMPS JUSTICE

Can you get away with murder in a country that claims it is governed by the "rule of law"?



Well, it depends on who you know.

A drunken brawl, a death, a favor

According to the police report, Nuñez said it was a stereo that a friend had given him to throw away. The officer asked more questions. Nuñez grew argumentative and invoked his family connections: “Do you know who my dad is? He is Fabian Nuñez. He’s an assemblyman in Sacramento. I am going to call my dad.”

Nuñez called his father and handed the cellphone to the officer.

The report does not record what the Assembly speaker said. Nuñez says he told the officer, “If my son did something wrong, he should pay for it.”

The case was classified as “suspended due to lack of solvability factors.”

Three months later, as they cleaned out Nuñez’s vacated dorm room during the summer break, a Cal State L.A. crew found an empty box for a Mossberg shotgun, according to a police report.

It was against the law to bring a shotgun to school, but police could not prove that he had.

Now, studying everything detectives had learned about the San Diego State stabbing, DiCarlo tried to understand the dynamics at play among the attackers. Nuñez seemed to be the glue, the one who brought them all together.

In the chaos of the fight, no one could positively identify who had stabbed whom, and the surveillance footage did not help. But DiCarlo was confident the law was on her side. She did not need to prove who did the stabbing. All four men in Nuñez’s group had acted together in encouraging the attack, as she saw it, and all would be considered principals under the aider-and-abettor law.

“In a group fight, it’s almost impossible to ascertain who did it,” she says. “That’s why the law treats them exactly the same.”

The charge would be murder.