MEXICO CAN'T BE A SAFE HAVEN FOR COP KILLERS.

Byline: Adam B. Schiff and David Dreier 

ON April 29, 2002, Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy David March was brutally slain execution-style during a routine traffic stop. Suspect Armando Garcia fled to Mexico within hours of Deputy March's death and has eluded prosecution by U.S. authorities.

We firmly believe that the Bush administration should use all mechanisms available to cause Mexico to change its policy regarding the extradition of nationals.

To that end, we have both fought for the last three years to see Armando Garcia and other fugitives accused in killings brought back to the U.S. to face justice for brutal crimes. We have met with officials from the Department of Justice and the State Department. We have written repeatedly, joined by other members of Congress, to President Bush and to Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, calling for aggressive action to change Mexico's extradition policy. We have even met with high officials of the Mexican government in an effort to impress upon our neighbor the intolerable nature of its extradition policy.

However, three years later, Armando Garcia and thousands of other fugitives still roam free.

We will continue to work with the administration to bring Deputy March's murderer to justice. We will also continue our fight to persuade Mexico to change its policy. But until that is achieved, the Congress has a duty to act as well.

It was at the urging of Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca that we have introduced The Peace Officer Justice Act. This bill ensures that criminals who murder law enforcement officials and flee the country to avoid prosecution will have the full weight of the federal government on their trail.

Currently under federal law, it is a crime to kill a federal peace officer or state/local officers if they are engaged in a federal investigation. We believe there is no reason that a heinous crime, such as the one in Deputy March's case, should not also be a federal crime with the same penalties as the murder of a federal officer.

Some question how our legislation will make a difference since fleeing the country to avoid prosecution is already a federal crime. However, the punishment for fleeing prosecution under existing law is no more than five years or even merely a fine. We believe that a fine or five years imprisonment for the coldblooded murder of a law enforcement officer is tantamount to no justice at all.

The penalty for murdering a cop and fleeing the country under H.R. 2363 is the death penalty or life in prison.

The passage of H.R. 2363 will signal to Mexico and any other country that refuses to extradite a fugitive cop-killer that the Congress of the United States considers this a crime against America and will bring the full resources of the federal government to bear to seek justice. For this reason, both Sheriff Baca and La Verne Police Chief Ronald Ingels were present to support the introduction of our bill.

It will always be our preference for state and local prosecutors to go after cop killers - police keep our local communities safe and local prosecutors should have primary jurisdiction over these cases. But where a local prosecutor cannot act, the federal government has an interest in seeing that fugitive killers not continue to roam free elsewhere, or return to this country to kill again.