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Free The
Border Patrol Two
Debra J. Saunders
January 18, 2007
Prison doors clanged shut last night, leaving two Border Patrol agents
locked up among the very types of felons they once helped put away. The
agents' families have been wiped out financially, their kids will grow
up without a father watching over them, their freedom has been stripped
from them. What was the terrible crime that put agents Ignacio Ramos
and Jose Alonso Compean behind bars for sentences of 11 years and 12
years, respectively?
They fired at a drug smuggler, who had been driving a van with 743
pounds of marijuana, as he ran toward the border to avoid arrest. They
say they did not know they wounded him in the buttocks, so they picked
up their shells and filed a false report that didn't mention the
shooting.
For that, Johnny Sutton, the U.S. attorney for Western Texas,
prosecuted the agents. After a two-and-a-half-week trial, a jury found
them guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon, discharge of a firearm
during a violent crime, obstructing justice, lying about the incident
and willfully violating the Fourth Amendment right to be free from
illegal seizure of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, the Mexican drug smuggler,
who, incidentally, is suing the Border Patrol for $5 million because
his civil rights were violated.
Sutton isn't happy about granting the smuggler immunity, but as he told
me over the phone, he didn't have enough evidence to prosecute
Aldrete-Davila.
Sutton hates being called "an overzealous prosecutor." As he said in a
statement, "In America, law enforcement officers do not get to shoot
unarmed suspects who are running away and file official reports that
are false." And, "It is shocking that there are people who believe it
is OK for agents to shoot at an unarmed suspect who is running away."
As for the long sentences, they are the doing of Congress, which tacked
10 years onto federal sentences for crimes committed with guns -- and
there is no exemption for law enforcement officers.
Let me say this: Border Patrol agents do not have a right to -- and
should not -- shoot at unarmed suspects. When and if they do shoot
unarmed suspects, they should be disciplined -- and that includes
firing them.
In this case, however, Ramos and Compean say they thought the suspect
was armed. Sutton says that's not true. Ditto the drug smuggler -- but
he has 5 million reasons to lie.
Two of Aldrete-Davila's family members, who asked not to be named for
fear of retaliation, told the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin that the
smuggler had been dealing drugs since age 14 and, according to one, he
"wouldn't move drugs unless he had a gun on him."
Sutton responded, "There's this impression that all these dopers carry
guns," but mules -- smugglers such as Aldrete-Davila -- "almost never
carry guns," because federal law "tacks on five years to their
sentence."
Even if everything Sutton says is true, Ramos and Compean most
certainly should not spend 11 and 12 years behind bars. I don't think
they should spend a single night in prison -- not for what was a
mistake (if the smuggler was not armed) made in the heat of the moment,
even if it was followed with a cover-up.
Americans should not put men in frustrating and dangerous
law-enforcement positions, then lock them up and throw away the key if
those men do one wrong thing, especially of the sort that angry, scared
men sometimes do. It is not as if Ramos and Compean were crooked agents
running criminal enterprises and betraying their fellow agents. If they
were, they'd probably be facing a shorter sentence.
As T.J. Bonner of the agents' union, told me: "It's going to be
terrible. These are good cops going to prison. It's not as if they're
bad cops who are going to be accepted into the community. The very
people they put away are going to be in the next cell to these guys."
Asked if President Bush would pardon the agents last Friday, White
House spokesman Tony Snow noted that a jury had convicted them after a
long trial. "We also believe that the people who are working to secure
that border themselves obey the law."
Bonner looks at Bush's decision not to pardon the two men as a signal
that Dubya doesn't particularly care about securing America's borders.
It is not as if Bush has too many friends and too much public support.
I've heard from many Americans who are outraged at these excessive
sentences and don't understand why Bush has not used his pardon power
to commute the sentences of agents who were just doing their jobs.
If anything happens to these men while they are behind bars, then what
will America think of George W. Bush?
