What About the murder charges? Has he already served time for them or has he been found not guilty or is he awaiting trial?

Please excuse my ignorance on this case and the significance of this post.

Thereafter, he committed a murder. If he had been deported instead of going to SFO on his 20 year old marijuana charge, he wouldn't have been there to murder the woman (theoretically; he's been deported before and returned.)

The complaint is that SFO should never have asked for him on this cheesy little marijuana charge and then dismissed it after he got there. Or something.

Just because the sheriff said we want him, then let him go?

I hope the SF Board of Supervisors & the Mayor investigate this matter further...and if it turns out that he did lie, they should ask him to resign.

K&R

Or if he knew some of the facts but not that possibly some lower-level official requested him.

I'd be interested in knowing why he was requested. Was it actually to prosecute him, or keep him from being deported? That would be a political scandal.

And, no, that the charges were dismissed isn't sufficient. The decision to request him for prosecution may have been made by one person going over a list of detainees being released cross-referenced with a list of outstanding warrants. The dismissal may have been requested by somebody else after reviewing the man's actual file and determining that there were insufficient grounds to win a conviction. Or even after the realization that his crime isn't a crime prosecutable under current law, or if sentenced he'd be released because of California's prison overcrowding.

He was deported 5 times, IIRC, and that's a problem. But mostly this isn't just a horrible murder, it's a horrible political problems for deportation policy and border security. Everybody is trying to say that they're not at fault instead of saying that a lot of people are at fault. Heck, I've seen vague attempts to deflect the blame for his murder on the fact that his gun was stolen from a BLM officer, as though the very existence of the gun induces automatic thoughts of theft and murder.

IMO, this never would have happened if Richard Hongisto was still Sheriff.

He's been hit by multiple scandles. Deptuies forcing inmates to fight. Domestic violence against his wife. He got the records expunged on that last one.
He's got more lives than a cat.

I wish I had saved the link, but there was a story I read yesterday where deputies were ordered not to inform on illegal immigrants to INS, but were anonymous doing it. He cracked down on that.
This piece of filth should be in federal prison for ordering his subordinates to defy federal law.

Mayor Ed Lee broke his silence Wednesday blaming the sheriff for not warning the feds about Sanchez' release.
He said such a call would not have violated the city's Sanctuary Law designed to protect undocumented immigrants.
"Nothing in that law prevents or prohibits communication, notification with our federal and state law enforcement officials," said Lee.
"Do I need to educate somebody about how to pick up a phone?"

More:
http://abc7news.com/news/sf-mayor-sheriff-engage-in-war-of-words-after-pier-14-shooting/836683/

because of domestic violence. Then his guards persuaded inmates to fight like gladiators by offering burgers. His term has been a mess.

...evil, EVIL laws against marijuana!

In this case, if Lopez-Sanchez intentionally committed the murder (which is very much in question, it seems to me), then our evil, EVIL laws against marijuana, combined with our evil prisons, likely created a monster--a man initially apparently sane becoming psychotic and randomly murdering someone, due to unjust incarceration in our notoriously brutal prisons. And if Lopez-Sanchez did NOT intentionally commit murder (picked up a trash bundle containing a gun which accidentally went off when he handled it, as he claims), then our evil laws against marijuana started the chain of events that put him there for that to happen, and very likely put him there in a shaky enough state of mind and body that he took the risk of picking up a strange bundle--perhaps hoping it contained food, money or something useful to his survival in an uncaring world--and further made him shaky in handling the surprising contents of the bundle, the weapon.

In BOTH cases, these evil laws against an innocent medicinal plant started the chain of misery--a chain that tortures and brutalizes people, a chain that impoverishes people and destroys families, a chain made to order for prison profiteers of all kinds, and a chain that creates the highest prison population in the developed world, a disgrace to our nation.

We need to look much deeper than which police agency released Lopez-Sanchez, or whether anybody (the sheriff?) lied about it, and much, much deeper than immigration policy. This is NOT primarily an immigration issue! It is very likely a matter of unjust incarceration in the first place! If Lopez-Sanchez committed this random, senseless, motiveless murder, then the courts need to deal with that, in a fair trial, with his sanity evaluated. His guilt or innocence of the murder has absolutely nothing to do with his immigration status--it could have happened anywhere. It also has nothing to do with why he was imprisoned--violations of evil laws against marijuana and questionable, often unjust, immigration laws--except that BEING IN prison can drive you crazy and/or turn a peaceful man into a violent one.

We need to END the vile, corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" NOW!

The judge dropped it. The Sheriff should have known that, too.