I don’t remember any Johnny Sutton lackeys. Certainly some people were called names, which hardly aids in the level of discourse.
There was valid news sources which contained the erroneous charge that Compean had said he was “out to shoot Mexicans”. I don’t think we should call people names if they quote from erroneous news sources, or else we’d all have to call each other names all the time since most all news has some error (and there’d be a LOT of namecalling with all the quoting of WND).
I see little difference between Johnny Sutton's behavior and that of the Raleigh, North Carolina DA who knowingly smeared the Duke students in a recent rape case. That DA was disbarred. Sutton went all over explaining how the perp tried to surrender [then Sutton held his hands up to the camera...”just like this”, he said.] And then he ran away and “was shot in the back.” Well, he was shot in the side. And, whether or not he really surrendered in such a fashion, only two people know. And, was he really armed, no one will ever know that except the drug smuggler. Sutton didn't know anything, but he went around condemning the agents as if he had seen them on tape!
Sutton chose to believe the drug smuggler and not the agents. Since we all saw how the prosecution dealt with the agents, I am not surprised that they were not more forthcoming. As it was, and as calcowgirl indicated, the agents really should have been dealt with administratively, if at all.
The real travesty is that the ten year sentence was tacked on for using a gun “in the commission of a crime.” Sutton tried to say if the agents were more truthful, he wouldn't have prosecuted them. So, he really was nailing them for lying [in his opinion] to the prosecutors and not for the shooting itself. That was a flagrant misuse of that law and I am most surprised that a larger flap was not generated over Sutton's use of it.