Honduran man who had been deported twice before sentenced in murder case.
A Honduran man who had been deported twice before was sentenced in DC for the murder of a man in 2007. Hernan Melendez beat Andres Benitez to death with a baseball bat back then. He was tried and found guilty this past May and came up for sentencing this week. The sentence? He got 20 years in prison.
What the story is pretty light on details with is the question of 1) why this man was deported before and 2) whether he was an illegal entry into the US. I know we can make an assumption that he was – which raises the question of how he managed to get back in to the US twice before committing murder. But it also raises the question of why these questions weren’t even addressed in the story. I mean, they’re fairly obvious and, yet, they go unremarked. Why? What’s going through the reporter’s head that he doesn’t ask these questions? Or, if he did, what’s up with the editor that he clearly feels they weren’t germane to the story?
