Posted on 01/22/2007 8:26:15 PM PST by Kitten Festival
Justice: As the president weighs pardoning two imprisoned Border Patrol agents, the explanation for their prosecution raises more questions than it answers. Is U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton another Mike Nifong or Patrick Fitzgerald?
In response to public and congressional protests against what is perceived as a grievous miscarriage of justice, Bush told KFOX-TV in El Paso, Texas, that he would "take a sober look at the case" of Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean.
The two have begun serving prison terms for assaulting a purportedly unarmed Mexican drug smuggler in a February 2005 incident, obstructing justice and violating the Fourth Amendment rights of an illegal alien. We hope Bush will take a long look, for some things about the case just don't add up.
In an interview with World Net Daily, prosecutor Sutton said the agents "shot 15 times at an unarmed man running away" after the smuggler first tried to surrender. Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila ran away only after Compean hit him with the butt of his shotgun.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
"He was turned at the agents just like they said pointing a gun at them."
Read it again...the agents said the perp had a gun and was turned pointing it at them, not the medical examiner. The Med Exam said the wound showed he was not running away, but turned toward the agents.
"BONNER: But facts of this case do not bear out Mr. Sutton's version. The medical evidence from the army colonel who removed the slug shows that that person wasn't running away. He was turned at the agents just like they said pointing a gun at them."
Actually, if we use your parsing, it doesn't say he was turned toward the agents, it just says he was not running away. The "turned toward the agents" is "just as they said", as surely as "pointing a gun " is "just as they said".
IN fact, the use of the term "just as they said" suggests that the medical examiner made a statement agreeing with their claim, which was the claim in the second sentence, which included the gun.
BTW, I doubt the med exam said the wound showed he was turned toward the agents. We don't have the transcript, but that would be kind of a major bombshell in the court case that would have made the papers during the trial.
Prior to this, I don't remember anybody disputing the claims that Davila was shot in the butt, a rather hard thing to do if he was facing them.
But, let's try again. Let's presume just for this moment that Bonner is correct, and that the medical exam proves Davila was facing the agents.
How does that jive with the assertion in defense of the BP agents that Davila wasn't actually hit, that Ramos said the guy didn't flinch, and that no blood was found on the scene? You can't argue both that he was shot in the front proving he was facing them, AND that he wasn't shot at all.
You really make the simple too complicated.
The agents didn't think he was hit because he was able to RUN!
The information you want is sealed by the judge.....WHY?
Unless the smuggler had one before he tried to surrender, ditched it, and no one could find it.
That at least is one rational question you have asked -- why are the court transcripts sealed? Has that already been explained somewhere, and I missed it?
It's a lot easier for the pro-BP people to argue a half-dozen different versions of the events if we don't have the transcripts showing exactly what the agents testified to under oath. It isn't a crime for the agents to tell several different stories in public, after all.
I'm not sure why I keep trying, because evidence is just ignored here. I forget what the answer was last time I noted that it was the agents themselves who said there was no gun -- actually, I think that part of my post was ignored, as all evidence that is irrefutable is simply ignored.
There aren't any.
Can you cite any court case where an illegal alien was denied 4th Amendment protections during an arrest and the court specified the police were not obligated to abide by the 4th Amendment when arresting illegal aliens?
There are a number of cases that hold that the Border Patrol has a greater latitude in conducting searches for illegal aliens near the border, but they are still couched in a lot of boilerplate language about "reasonableness," etc. And an extended detention of a suspected illegal alien as a result of these searches triggers the Terry Rule and the 4th Amendment.
Yes, but were you told to return to DU, or some other Lib website? ;)
Nor is it for the prosecutor, unfortunately, even in court.
Border agent's wife at State of the Union
Congressman invites Monica Ramos to underscore Bush 'failure'
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53899
Monica Ramos, the wife of imprisoned former Border Patrol agent Ignacio Ramos, will attend the State of the Union tonight as a guest of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who has sharply criticized the president's handling of the case.
Rohrabacher's spokeswoman, Tara Setmayer, told WND the presence of Monica Ramos will send a message.
"The congressman felt it was important for Mrs. Ramos to have the opportunity while in the nation's capital to be a part of the State of the Union, because what her family is going through speaks volumes about the failure of the Bush administration to secure our borders." (snip)
LOL, were the defense attorney's smoking some of that confiscated creeper?
attorneys
I've never seen them publish that. Got a link?
Good points.
To sweeten the immunity deal, the feds paid for Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila’s medical treatment of his ailing backside – a taxpayer-funded recuperation at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas. He showed his gratitude by breaking his immunity agreement in October 2005, when officers say he attempted to smuggle 1,000 pounds of marijuana into America. The prosecution further extended its immunity to this felony and sealed the indictment from jurors. Aldrete-Davila repaid this new shower of grace by suing the federal government for $5 million, alleging the shooting violated his civil rights. However, he agreed to help in their criminal prosecution, as well, and the feds are apparently happy to collaborate with the pusher as long as he helped put effective lawmen behind bars.
It's not a "conspiracy". It's simply a prosecutor covering his ass to save face and to salvage the credibility and integrity of his witness. As I said before, Sutton's parsing of terms (claiming no "evidence" as opposed to calling the accusations lies) is an unfortunate example of legalese.
I'd really like to know where the "subsequent arrest" story started. As far as I can tell, someone mentioned it to a Congressman, the Congressman issued a press-release, and it was off to the presses. I do know that the D.A.'s office denies that a subsequent arrest occurred, but what that really means with regard to another immunity-deal I do not know.
I've got research to do. Where there is smoke there is usually fire...
I mean you guys were really going after the meanings between two words...And the definitions I retrieved from Websters, don't get me wrong, I'm not getting on either of y'alls cases, but the definitions really spelled out some interesting facts...in post #68...
If you were to read the Constitution in a manner such like a piece of poetry...Try to develop some sense of rythm, tempo, or beat...Read it like it was meant to flow off the page, like melted butter on popcorn...
You would see the beauty of how that document was devinely inspired, and was meant to be a joy to read, no matter how dry some try to make the meaning of the words...
Citizen or People...Those words were carefully chosen and presented to mean something more than a dry/technical definition...
I do understand that it is important to know this document inside and out...And be able to apply it in the way it was meant from the beginning...
Getting bogged down in semantics tends to bring its relevance down to a level where people who wish to destroy its intent can do so much easier...
Thats what I understand that when I took oaths in the past to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, that it wasn't so much the document itself, that it meant more to me to protect and defend those people and citizens who live under its protections of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...
Ok, I'm off...geesh...
As even the most rudimentary legal scholar understands, if a passage is unclear, then one must look to things such as committee hearings, existing case law, and yes, the dictionary in order to determine what the law means. In the case of the Constitution, one looks to the Federalist Papers or some other contemporaneous writing. There is nothing in the volumes of such work that indicates the Founders meant to conflate the meanings of the word "citizen" with the words "person," or "people." As I mentioned earlier, the text of the Constitution itself indicates that the Founders knew of the distinction between the terms, and meant to keep it. One is perfectly entitled to argue that the Constitution only applies to citizens, as long as one understands that, essentially, one is arguing that the Founders were specific in one regard but unspecific the other. In other words, they didn't know what the heck they were doing.
I don't mind pointing it out to catcalls from the peanut gallery . . . but one thing I did not address was the essential absurdity of the position: as if the Founders (even setting aside the issue of slavery, a debate that is well-documented), undertook from the start to create a document that was so limited in scope that it could not even address the notion that a post-Revolutionary American colonial might share the same rights as the British subject living next door. And again, assuming the argument is correct (that the Constitution only applies to citizens), one should wonder why none (or mostly none--this I have not researched) of the Founders envisioned three legal/court systems instead of two: Federal, State, and "whatever it is I want to call the one that adjudicates the rights of non-citizens."
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