This tells me BIAS:
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor
The border patrol agents need to be pardoned and their cells filled with Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila and Johnny "I make Nifond look good" Sutton.
Bump
The point is not even whether they were corrupt, it is that our government expended inordinately more energy on prosecuting these two agents that it has spent on tracking down illegals. Just about once a week a trailer full of illegals runs off the road and kills ten or twenty. But we've got prosecutors more interested in whether a drug dealer caught a bullet in the but.
Sometimes you have to weigh where you put your effort. Suspend the two, slap them on the wrist, sure. But they were at least on our side.
Can't Wait for the
"Border Patrol Good, Drug Smugglers Bad"
sheep to weigh in..
I think this is a very well-reasoned and informative article. It's nice to read material from cooler heads once in a while.
What a bunch of...spin. This journalist takes the word of a drug smuggler and calls it "facts," and then calls the Border Patrolmen liars when they present their version of the incident. It must be just because I'm not a left wing journalist that I tend to believe the Border Patrolmen.
Excerpt:
Group Rights Breed Disrespect For The Law, And Disrespect Breeds Disobedience
When we create “rights” that only apply to certain groups of people but not to others, we violate a basic rule of law that everybody intuitively senses to be a good and just principle – equal protection and equal application of the law.
When the law treats people differently, the natural by-product is disrespect for the law. Anybody who has ever been subjected to the harsher side of a double standard has sensed the inherent injustice of that treatment. In a free society such as ours, we depend upon widespread voluntary compliance with the law without any need for the application of external force. However, it is unreasonable to expect people to act this way when they see unequal application of the law. More likely, they will develop a scofflaw attitude rather than a compliant one. Thus we risk the long-term health of the legal system when we create “group rights” which, as was discussed earlier, are not really rights at all, but rather some form of selective entitlement bestowed upon one group at the expense of all others.
As the law expands inappropriately and/or out of proportion and consequently, my respect for it generally diminishes, I find myself becoming more aggressive in liberally interpreting particular laws in my favor -- even when I understand and agree with the purposes behind those laws. My attitude tends to become more of : “What do I want and how can I manipulate the law to get my way?” (i.e. a scofflaw attitude) rather than “What does the law require of me? Like everybody else, I need to comply as a good citizen.” (snip)
Interestingly enough, the Virginia statute can be used against any individual present during such a crime, not just the guys with the guns. It can be used against folks who are in the slammer already planning crimes for their buddies on the outside to commit.
Presumably the federal statute follows the same logic. Ergo, the two agent's supervisor, and his supervisor, and all the way up to the President, should be serving the time.
Obviously the sentencing guidelines were not followed correctly and Sutton and his sycophants are being quite disingenuous about how the law should be applied, or, and this is a really big "or", the law does not apply to officers of the law while on duty.
McCarthy, ya need to check this mornings news. Its full of cover-up by those YOU are defending. Your long winded spin just proves YOUR OWN Liberal bias.
They could clear this up rather quickly by simply releasing the court transcripts.
Not doing so makes it look like they have something to hide.
well, just because the facts are there, and finally out in print, is no reason for sanity to prevail in this issue. these guys belong in jail.
This sounds like a repulsive piece of sophistry by one government lawyer in defense of another. McCarthy admits that the encounter was "so chaotic" that the other agents' testimony wasn't adequate to "get" Compean and Ramos, which was clearly Sutton's only priority. In such a high-adrenalin situation, apparently he would rather the agents stopped, held a meeting, and got out their law books, before deciding what to do. Obviously he has no experience of actually fighting crime in the real world.
He also says: "But did the indictment really have to be this severe? After all, the sentences are extremely harsh. Here, the agents have mainly themselves to blame. The government offered them very generous plea deals. Compean and Ramos spurned them."
Just maybe they spurned the deal because they felt they were innocent! This racket of bashing people because they will not cave in is a favorite of prosecutorial bullies.
Juries can be manipulated by prosecutors, so a jury verdict is no guarantee that justice was done. It's quite likely that Sutton was smarter and slicker than the agents' lawyers and the ordinary civilians on the jury. The idea that he was willing and able to pluck a big-time drug smuggler out of corrupt Mexico, solely in order to destroy a couple of agents whose conduct may or may not have been ideal, is frightening.
With the country flooded with drugs and illegal aliens, McCarthy wants us to believe that Sutton is an effective "law and order conservative?" Give me a break.
How about this quote: "Compean unleashed an incompetent fuselage"
Are we to assume that the Border Patrol is equipped with unmanned aircraft? Is that how agent Compean set off a "fuselage" at the smuggler? I suspect that the rest of McCarthy's tirade is just as inaccurate.
It's a good article. But none of this would've happened if the border had been sealed off. It's time to build the fence!
National Review is listening to the load of hooey being perpetrated by overzealous, politically ambitious (and little white lie teller) Sutton. They've just sunk their own credibility with this garbage. They don't know what they are talking about and they miss the big point and the big picture which is that people who smuggle marijuana into our country by the ton DO NOT DESERVE IMMUNITY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. I really hope Sutton feels the effects of his willingness to let dopers run free here (with $5 million in taxpayer dollars). I hope his property values fall when these same dopers he let run free in order to prosecute agents move next door to him.