Federal prosecutors did not watch video of the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis for weeks after falsely charging him

And are very lucky that prosecutors have essentially total immunity, because even broad qualified immunity might not save the officers who lied under oath here [gift link]:

Almost immediately after an immigration agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis this winter, the federal government cast the injured man as an attempted murderer and the agent as the victim of a brutal beating.

That version of events began unraveling when prosecutors dropped felony charges against the injured man, Julio C. Sosa-Celis, and one of his housemates, Alfredo A. Aljorna, who had fled from immigration agents.

Yet video footage of the shooting, newly obtained by The New York Times, raises questions about why it took weeks for the government’s case to fall apart.

The video contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.

The federal government had access to that video within hours of the shooting on Jan. 14, the Minneapolis police chief said. Yet prosecutors did not watch the footage, an official said, until nearly three weeks after they filed charges against the two men.

“Bare due diligence would have shown that the agents were lying,” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said in a recent interview, shortly after he watched the video for the first time.

The shooting was a rare instance in which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration ultimately acknowledged a serious lapse. The agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, said after the charges were dropped that two agents had appeared to have lied under oath about the events, adding that they had been placed on leave and could end up facing criminal charges.

The Department of Homeland Security did not answer written questions about the video, including whether it reviewed the footage before describing the incident publicly. The video, which The Times obtained after filing an open records request, was recorded on a city-owned camera at a nearby intersection.

The shooting of Mr. Sosa-Celis came during the height of the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of immigration agents to Minnesota.

I know there are limitations to what body cameras can accomplish which are also manifest in this case — there is no perfect ex ante cure for law enforcement officers willing to openly defy the law and lie — but it should be obvious that the alternative of relying mostly in they-said accounts would be considerably worse.