Just before midnight on July 24, 2017, Miss. Police had come looking for a domestic violence suspect, only to knock on the door of the wrong house and then open fire on the innocent man inside. By the time paramedics arrived, 41-year-old Ismael Lopez, an auto mechanic known for mentoring troubled teens and fixing his neighbors’ cars for free, had died of a gunshot wound to the back of his head.
Now, attorneys for the city of Southaven are using an unusual approach to try to persuade a federal judge to dismiss the $20 million civil rights lawsuit filed by Lopez’s widow. They argue that because the victim was an undocumented immigrant, he wasn’t protected by the U.S. Constitution.
“If he ever had Fourth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment civil rights, they were lost by his own conduct and misconduct,” attorney Katherine S. Kerby wrote in a brief filed Sept. 4. “Ismael Lopez may have been a person on American soil but he was not one of the ‘We, the People of the United States’ entitled to the civil rights invoked in this lawsuit.”
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