had finished a federal prison sentence for illegal re-entry into the United States and was transferred in March 2015 to San Francisco's jail to face a 20-year-old charge for selling marijuana. The sheriff's department released him a few days later after the district attorney dropped the marijuana charge, despite a U.S. request to detain him for deportation.

President Trump said during the campaign that Steinle's death was another reason the United States needed to build a wall on its southern border and tighten its immigration policies. Since taking office, Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from places with similar sanctuary city laws.

Defense attorneys have told jurors that Garcia Zarate lived on the streets of San Francisco after being released from jail, scraping together a living by collecting recyclables(COMT), the enzyme that Hall believes is a key mediator of placebo effects:

When Hall contacted him, she seemed like a perfect addition to the team he was assembling to do just that. He even had an idea of exactly how she could help. In the course of conducting the study, Kaptchuk had taken DNA samples from subjects in hopes of finding some molecular pattern among the responses. This was an investigation tailor-made to Hall’s expertise, and she agreed to take it on. Of course, the genome is vast, and it was hard to know where to begin — until, she says, she and Kaptchuk attended a talk in which a colleague presented evidence that an enzyme called COMT affected people’s response to pain and painkillers. Levels of that