“One small detail is left out: They weren’t convicted for shooting the drug smuggler...”
Actually, they were convicted of assault. But not on a drug smuggler as they didn’t know that he was at the time they shot him. They didn’t even know if he was an illegal.
They just shot him because he made them look bad.
“They didn’t even know if he was an illegal.”
They did know that the van came into this country illegally. The van set off an alarm as it crossed into this country. That is what started this whole affair. Also, they may not have known he was a drug smuggler, but they knew he acted like drug smugglers and he had come into this country illegally.
Male bovine feces! Ramos was never made to look bad since his only "direct" encounters with Davila was to shout at him and eventually nail him in the posterior at around 180 feet with a 40 S&W.
BTW. I just got back from another trip which allowed me to remeasure the ditch. I was wrong. The angle is extremely difficult to accurately measure, but the best I could do was calculate that it was around 55 degrees. This was after two visits, one going and one on return.
The "going" trip was nearly fruitless due to high winds. The only measure I could do was to reverify the hypotenuse as 17 feet and got a tenuous measure of 60 degrees for the slope. On return I got a better angle measurement(I trust it more) with a result of a ~55-60 degree angle. This was backed up with a measurement with rocks(yeah, rocks which you belittle). Three sets of 10 rocks( 30 total) gave me, 1.181, 1.18, and 1.195 seconds for time of fall. Subtracting a determined 0.1 second delay factor from the average of the three sets results in a time of 1.085 seconds giving a height of ~18.8 feet above the water. Subtracting the height of the toss above the ground gives around 14 to 15 feet for the depth of the ditch. This measure agrees with the ~55-60 degree angle measured. The long and short is that the ditch is not 20 feet deep. That does not mean that Compean fell head first into the ditch. He still would have gone to the bottom had that happened.
P.S. The BP probably are accustomed to me. The did not come to ask me what I was doing.