eyewitness accuser, Victor Daniel Reyes, a member of a gang allegedly involved in the shooting and the victim’s cousin. As the two stand almost nose-to-nose, Reyes sticks to his story. Then Zúñiga asks Reyes whether he knows that Zúñiga tested negative for gunpowder, as did Reyes. Matching Zúñiga’s slow and deliberate pacing (for the benefit of the court typist), Reyes drops a bombshell: “I did not know that they did the same test that you now mention. And it is true I did not see who fired the gun.”
During the closing statements, the prosecutor decides not to make any arguments, but instead to submit them on a floppy computer disc. The judge agrees to this. In a stunning exchange with the prosecutor, Zúñiga asks her to explain, in everyday language, her grounds for accusing him. The answer would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. “Why do I accuse him?” she says with a wan smile. “Because it’s my job.”
No matter how obvious the injustice of Zúñiga’s conviction, the new verdict, rendered by Judge Palomares on Feb. 25, 2008, came back the same as the original one — guilty. Astoundingly, the transcripts from the retrial simply restated the original trial’s judgment, dismissing any exonerating evidence. Furthermore, only what the judge had dictated had been incorporated into the court’s record. But there was another, incontrovertible record of the retrial — Hernández and Negrete’s video footage.
Ultimately, the video record convinced an appeals panel to free Zúñiga in April 2008 after 842 days in jail. In September 2008, award-winning director Geoffrey Smith was asked to re-cut the film with Hernández.
Festival screenings of Presumed Guilty (Presunto Culpable in Spanish) have elicited tears and standing ovations. Mexicans, who are aware of the dysfunction of their system, were still
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