Posted on 09/24/2007 6:15:44 AM PDT by Boston Blackie
I have no response to your statement, but I had to put something here because I was called out for not responding to every reply to me.
I thought your response was fine, and had nothing to add, but as you know I was chided for not responding to everything.
So to respond, I appreciate your offer to provide additional information when it becomes available. I always like new information.
I would say that you do seem to take, if not responsibility, a great concern for correcting things in SOME other people’s posts. But I am NOT faulting you for which posts you respond to, and which you don’t. I’m only faulting you for complaining about me participating in the thread, and noting that if you DID respond to other people’s errors, I wouldn’t be here.
It wasn’t a criticism of you, and I apologize for anybody who thought it was. It was a SUGGESTION of a way you could keep me out of your threads.
I was going to let this go because it was way off-topic, but since you forced me, here goes:
I agree, people are entitled to their own opinions.
I cannot say I’ve noted that you “rarely comment” on people’s opinions. You have commented extensively about MY opinions of what happened, as well as others who have opinions that don’t support your belief in this case.
That’s your right, I don’t fault you for commenting on my opinions, but I just can’t agree that you “rarely” do so.
As I said, I really didn’t want to respond to this, but you forced me to.
I apologize for any suggestion that YOU in your post said what I said. I sometimes actually write my own words in posts rather than what other people said, and address more than what was in the referenced comment. Sometimes that means that my response isn’t specifically about that one comment.
I wasn’t going to respond further to this, because I thought your chastisement of me was sufficient to defend your honor.
What I’m not sure of is that, if I said you rejected the claim that Sanchez was part of an evil conspiracy, would I be telling the truth? Or do you NOT reject that claim? Or maybe you have no opinion of it.
But this is very off-topic, and I only mention it because I was told I needed to respond to every comment made to me no matter how complete they already were.
Thank you for allowing me to have my own opinion.
DO you believe that if WND had asked jurors who said they still agreed with the guilty verdict, they would have told you that?
I will agree though that it is possible that the other 9 told them to shove off, or wouldn’t talk to them. So really all I can say is to me it is likely that some of them stood by their verdict, and WND didn’t report that.
My reply wasn’t “complete” because I didn’t deal with the 2nd question.
If I believe a person committed a crime, because they were tried and convicted of the crime and because the evidence I see makes that conviction plausible, I’m not going to say they should go free just because their incarceration is hard on their families.
I realise that in order to believe they are guilty, I have to believe that they lied about some things, and therefore I am in some way “impugning” their character, which could be “hard on their families”. But again, that would be true of ANY case where there is a person who is tried and convicted.
If there was solid evidence presented that Sutton committed a crime, I wouldn’t fault people for presenting and commenting on that evidence, even though it would hurt his family.
But, as is seen by POST 1 of this thread, some C/R supporters see nothing wrong with making suggestions of criminal or unethical activity even by the appeals court justices, with NOT evidence to back up the claim.
If someone today posted an attack on Compean based on the now-withdrawn “want to shoot mexicans” charge, and nobody else responded, I would respond to that to correct the record. Because it would be a false personal attack.
Sorry to be so long-winded. I’ve said nothing particularly useful here, and frankly it seemed clear that the “what about the families” was meant not as a serious question for me to answer, but as a rhetorical question to question my concern for the families of others who had been so-far-unsubstantiatedly accused of crimes.
I’ve responded now because, well by now you all know why.
I responded to others about this. Read those comments. It was idle speculaton, without foundation, and in my defence I LABELLED it as unfounded speculation.
It’s not even my opinion. Of course, it wasn’t even a statement, it was a question, and originally this response seemed like a rational REPLY to my question.
SO I guess I could just say, thanks for answering my question.
In case you missed it, every person here responded to my question with a resounding NO.
Don’t want anybody to think I or anybody else actually THINKS that to be true.
I’ve occasionally on this thread commented publicly about Bob’s comments. I won’t cite them here.
In general, I think freepmail is a better way to tell others if you think they are being too personal.
But frankly, while I don’t like to get personal, if people want to get it on with each other, who am I to object.
I wasn’t in any way trying to fault you for getting personal with Bob. It’s just that you had complained about his personal comments before. I’ve NEVER complained about your complaints about his comments.
I’ve never denied there was a report. But you’ve completely missed the point. The report does NOT GIVE ANY EVIDENCE. The report merely REPORTS THE EVIDENCE.
A REPORT IS NOT EVIDENCE. Repeat: An INVESTIGATIVE REPORT IS NOT EVIDENCE.
So far as I know about the investigative report, it contains the statements made by the Ortiz which were reported in WND. I also would believe it has the quote from his brother which I said was in WND but now have been convinced it was not.
But the inclusion of those statements is not new evidence, it’s just reporting the evidence.
So my prior comment “There is no evidence of a 2nd bust, onl a story in the WND”, was surely inaccurate, but NOT because there is an investigative report.
Instead, it was innaccurate because it was a sloppy, incomplete statement (although I only say this because of the quote you gave, which I don’t know if it was my entire quote).
Since there was no “2nd bust”, you can’t be arguing that I’m wrong that there is no evidence for it. Remember, some people were talking about how Davila was arrested (hence a “2nd bust”), but he was not arrested, there was no bust, just a statement from a person who WAS busted that he got drugs from Davila.
The WND article is where we read of the statement of Ortiz that Davila had delivered drugs, which is what i meant by “a story in the WND”.
Again, an INVESTIGATIVE REPORT is a report about evidence collected, it is NOT EVIDENCE. I have NEVER said there wasn’t an investigative report, merely that there was no evidence for a 2nd bust, and that the only known evidence for Davila involvement in another drug smuggling incident was the statement of Cipriana Ortiz (later correcting that error to include his brother, Jose Ortiz).
I wasn’t going to respond to this because, while you had mischaracterized my statements so as to make it look like I was contradicting myself, that didn’t bother me, and I didn’t think it was worth continuing the off-topic discussion, so I was willing to let you have the last word.
But you didn’t want to have the last word, so I’m responding now.
BTW, There ARE things where I change my view, usually it’s not to “acknowledge” something that supposedly I knew all along, but rather because I really am only trying to get to the truth, and when people show me where I am wrong (for example, when I said there was only ONE person saying Davila was involved), I stop saying the wrong thing and start saying what I have learned.
So if I HAD not known there was a report, and then someone gave me a link to a report, and I then said something about the report, it wouldn’t show that I was lying about there being a report, it would simply show that I can read, understand new evidence, and incorporate it.
Sorry for the long response. I’m sure nobody else wanted to read this.
I wasn’t going to respond, because my statement wasn’t specifically about you, and thought I’d let you have your denial.
But since you forced me to respond, you did attack me for being in this thread, and for taking it off topic. My off-topic comments started with an attempt to correct a comment in the 1st 10 that claimed Davila was arrested for a 2nd drug bust.
But in general, I don’t think of you as one of the “attackers”, although you did also attack me for not responding to all of your posts, a technically valid point which I am now correcting at great pains to every other reader.
You’re welcome.
I responded to a responder, so you could read that.
But just to be complete, I have no reason to believe there is any documentation anywhere that contains that claim.
The claim obviously came from somewhere, but I have no idea if someone SAID it but never wrote it down, or if someone made it up. At some level, it seems someone reported this up as if it was documented, when it wasn’t.
You can dig out whatever you want, I’m not claiming anybody said it, nor does it matter at all so far as the appeal is concerned. My only point here is that they did not admit to “lying”, they admitted that they didn’t have the evidence they thought they had.
In other words, nobody could possibly ADMIT that someone NEVER said something, because you couldn’t know that. They could only admit that they had no evidence for it.
Lest you think I’m trying to leave open the possibility for new evidence, I’m just noting that I can’t concede that something was never said, but that doesn’t mean I’m asserting it WAS said. Most of life is made up of things you don’t know, and the fewer assertions you make the better.
Not on this thread, and not in any thread in the last 3 months.
And since we were discussing what I said on THIS thread, what I said months ago before we knew the claim was unsubstantiated is hardly relevant.
And if that statement was wrong at the time I said it, I’m sure someone corrected me, and I’m sure that is why I no longer believe that statement to be true.
That’s how we all get smarter, by posting what we think is true, and getting corrected when we get something wrong.
If you gave me a reference (which seems it would be easy to do since you quoted me, I presume accurately) I could review the context and then address WHY I said it. I presume I said it because it was in something somebody posted at the time.
If your complaint is that my statement “considered a macho tatement, not an actual claim of intent to commit a felony” is countered by my quote where I appear to be talking about why the prosecuter would think he had a good case, and included the evidence that they had said they were “going to hurt a mexican”, I will note that my statement is NOT they they said they were going to “shoot” a mexican, and that I used it in reference to the allegation that Compean tried to strike the mexican.
I don’t know why I thought they had evidence the two said they were going to “hurt” a mexican. But that charge is much more believable, and therefore less likely to be dismissed, than a charge that they were going to “shoot mexicans”.
Now, if I had previously cited the “shoot mexicans” comment and said that showed why they had “shot at” mexicans, that would be a more credible complaint for which I would have to answer.
But in fact, I don’t think I would have said that a claim that the two of them had conspired to “hurt mexicans” was an idle boast or macho statement. A claim that the one guy was heard to say he was “out to shoot mexicans” sounds like a macho statement to me.
I hope you realise the difference between one guy quoted as saying “out to shoot mexicans”, and “the two were heard saying they were going to hurt a mexican”.
AGAIN, TO BE CLEAR: I am not now stating there is ANY evidence that “the two were heard saying they were going to hurt a mexican”, I apparently thought that was evidence at some time in the past, but I don’t think so now, nor do I now think that statement was based on anything but a mistaken report about what appears to also have been an unsubstantiated allegation.
AGAIN, TO BE CLEAR: I also think the “out to shoot mexicans” statement is an unsubtantiated allegation, and may have no basis in fact.
I believe a statement “out to shoot mexicans” sound more like a macho statement, while a claim that two men were heard saying they were “going to hurt a mexican” would be a more substantive claim which would be taken more seriously.
However, remember that all of this was in reference to whether I thought that the feds comments to congress were worse than people here saying everybody on the prosecution side was with the drug smugglers. It’s an absurd comparison, the one was a statement that SOMEONE thought was actual evidence, the other unsubstantiated claims made to attack people that stand in the way of a desired outcome.
But that’s just my opinion. I think the two are completely separate and independent things, and not comparible in any rational way.
I can’t control the one thing, but I can comment on what people here are doing.
I read the “here”. It said there was a claim that the two men “stated that day that ‘they wanted to shoot a mexican’”.
That is different than what I thought the claim was, that just Compean had said he wanted to “shoot mexicans”. I don’t know why I thought it was just compean, why it was “shoot mexicans” rather than “shoot a mexican”, why I thought it was a prior statement, and not a statement made on the day of the shooting.
I don’t know if the letter written that was at “here” accurately portrayed what was told, or whether what was told had not been accurately portrayed in whatever newspaper articles and posts I had read about it, or where I got the “shoot mexicans” rather than “shoot a mexican”.
Oh wait, I know where that last one came from. I’m just quoting what others wrote here.
But I see that my use of the word “joke” was the cause of your issue. I didn’t mean joke in that sense, nor would I have said so if I had been dealing with the statement from that letter, rather than the “shoot mexicans” statement I thought we were discussing.
Still, as I said before, this is a kind of pointless thing. YOu brought it up because I was faulting people here for attacking Sutton without evidence, and you complained that I wasn’t equally loud in complaining about the government’s actions to congress.
And frankly, I am still confused as to what is going on with the government stuff, but I don’t see how what is said to congress effected the trial, the conviction, or the appeal.
If there was testimony in the trial that is now know to be false, that would be an appealable item. Statements made to congress, while clearly important, are not appealable for the trial.
I was NOT the one who started making a comparison between these things, it was you asking me. I answered based on my opinion of the statement you gave me, not a detailed knowledge of the entirety of the letters from congressmen and testimony in congress. I haven’t followed, NOR DISCUSSED, the congressional aspect of this case in any detail, and when you asked I should have just turned down your invitation to compare them.
IN MY OPINION, I was less concerned about the damage to Compean’s reputation of someone claiming he had once said he “wanted to shoot mexicans” (that’s the quote I was asked to comment on, not the I presume real quote as given in the letter you now referenced), than the damage people HERE were doing to the reputations of a large group of people without evidence.
I should have just said they were both bad, and not tried to compare them like you did. I apologize for that.
If I was talking to a person who had just admitted they had accused compean of saying something he didn’t say, I would be attacking that person. But that person doesn’t seem to be on this thread.
I also think Hitler was a very bad man, in case my not attacking him could be taken by someone to mean I didn’t think he was evil.
Also there’s a lot of other evil people and evil things that I have not attacked here.
As I already posted, I commented on that and other issues of the appeal in other comments.
But the first post in this thread suggested the thread was about whether the appeals court was friends with sutton or drug smugglers.
And in the 1st 10 comments at least twice someone said Davila was arrested for a 2nd drug bust, and so the thread was pretty much hijacked before I got here.
In fact, very FEW people have commented on the topic of the thread.
I wouldn’t answer this but you insisted.
Actually, they could be investigating where the drugs came from, and where they were going to go.
There are several things that corroborate the legitimacy of the reports, particularly the mention of the six bundles in the van which squares with the publicly released Cipriano Ortiz investigation report which came out several months after the DEA report story was published.
Cipriano would have known how many bundles were in the van, so that doesn't really "corroborate" anything else, but I don't think anybody's disputing that there was a van with drugs.
We know Davila had to be the smuggler who delivered the van because Judge Cardon confirms Davila's involvement in that incident in the trial transcripts and that incident was all about the van full of dope.
The judge did not confirm his involvement, she confirmed there was a story. The conversation didn't deal with the truth of the story, just it's admisability.
OK, I've corrected that fault.
I don't intend to respond further, or to be held to the standard of having to answer every thing posted to me.
I really wanted to stop all the off-content posts, at least those not involving misstatements of fact, but you insisted that I needed to respond to your questions and comments, so I did.
I hope you won't continue to insist I respond to everything. I didn't want to do it, I'm sorry I did it, and I hope not to do it again.
For the record:
I think the appeal of the application of the law will fail. I think the other appeals will also fail. But I dont say that because of an expert knowledge of the law, nor is that my "desire". It's just my opinion.
As impressive as a search of the congressional record could be, in the end judges aren't compelled to apply that record when the law is clear and could have clearly been written otherwise if desired.
If the appeals court finds that congress could have easily written the law to exclude cases like this one, they will take the fact they didn't as being more important than whatever they said while they were passing the law.
To use an example, democrats often say they are passing laws for one reason, when those laws actually do the opposite. Nobody interprets those laws based on what the democrats SAY they will do.
BTW... I did not "insist" nor "complain" nor "demand" that you answer, nor did I "attack" you, despite your multiple allegations that I did. I pointed out that you did not respond (#402), and told you it was "B.S." when you claimed you had (#406). If you think I that is insisting, demanding, or complaining, so be it. You are, after all, entitled to your opinion. ;-)
As to the appeal, I think you are not focusing on the main points, but time will tell. I assume we will have another thread before this is over.
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