Hey, everyone. Quick note before we start the show. There are some descriptions of gun violence in this episode, just so you know. Okay, here we go.

Mark Joseph Stern covers the Supreme Court for Slate. He's been thinking a lot about this decision that came down last week. It's about an incident that happened back in 2010

when this Border Patrol agent, a guy named Jesus Mesa, shot and killed a Mexican teenager

in the middle of the day. Maybe we're all just really cynical about Customs and Border

Protection and ICE at this point, but it seems to me like this is a pretty momentous

case and the consequences could be absolutely devastating.

This case, it's called Hernandez v. Mesa. We'll get to the consequences of it in a second.

But the facts, they are pretty devastating too.

Yeah, it's funny. I've heard a lot of people talk about this case, and whenever I read about the facts in the case, I think of myself as a teenager.

Like, I think about the stupid stuff I did.

I mean, teenagers play games.

Teenagers have underdeveloped brains.

Teenagers don't necessarily have that impulse that adults

might have to, like, run and hide from an armed border patrol agent standing yards away

from you on the other side of the border. And that's sort of what happened here, right?

What happened is that 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez was hanging out along the border with some of his friends.

And when I say the border, don't picture a remote area or a desert.

Picture a bunch of criss-crossing highways and bridges, a place with people.

Enough people that there's cell phone video of what happened next.

That's when these kids came into contact with Agent Mesa.

The agent says, oh, they were trying to cross the border illegally and they were throwing rocks.

You know, I just had to make the split-second decision.

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