Border Patrol Criminals and Criminality

Another shooting on the border, another controversy, two more minor league hires by a mushrooming incompetent Border Patrol and two felony convictions. What else is new?

An El Paso federal jury convicted two Border Patrol agents (Ignacio Ramos, 37, and Jose Alonso Compean, 28) of multiple felonies for shooting an unarmed Mexican marijuana smuggler, for covering up the shooting and for lying to their own agency. The felons are to be sentenced shortly. The defense claimed the agents "feared for their lives by pointing a gun at one of them," the usual refrain and defense by cops when they defend defenseless shootings.

The shooting agent claimed he saw a gun. Lie. No gun was ever found. The only thing found was a victim shot in the butt while running away. Nothing else was found because the agents cleaned up the 15 brass bullet casings of the 15 shots fired by both officers at the escaping smuggler. That is against the law. The jury saw through the fallacious defense and convicted the two men. End of story? No…

Enter the scene, the Minutemen and other anti-Mexican haters including the Border Patrol agent union and its leader, the great prevaricator, T.J. Bonner. Bonner claims that the offenses of these agents were minor and could be handled administratively. The U.S. Senate confirmed Republican United States Attorney of El Paso disagrees.

The Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist calls radio talk shows to express "complete" 100 percent support of the agents. He does so, of course, without ever reading comprehensive articles about the trial and the evidence and by suggesting the Bush Administration is railroading the two agents because it supports drug smuggling and Mexico.

As usual, the Minutemen and their support of these two felons are misplaced and manifested only because they hate the President of the United States and they hate Mexicans. Gilchrist is not a lawyer, thus he has no basis upon which to judge whether or not he knows more about the case and the law than, say, the United States Attorney in El Paso and the federal jury that found the men guilty, unanimously. He gets no help from his "staff" either. Steve Eichler, the man he sent to debate this writer out of fear he (Gilchrist) would be wiped out, claims to have a Juris Doctor law degree and that he left the practice of law to fight full time against illegal aliens. Apparently, however, didn’t practice law in California, if anywhere.

A check of the California State Bar web site of his name shows nothing. There is no record of his practicing law in California. He isn’t even listed as "inactive." Based on his extremely poor performance in the debate with this writer, there are doubts about his practicing law. Given his performance, we can surmise that he also doesn’t understand what happened in that El Paso courtroom.

As for Bonner, he’s just a union stooge defending two incompetent and criminal union member agents who probably should never have been hired in the first place. What’s funny is that some years ago, Bonner and I appeared on the same program together and he agreed with me that by quickly doubling and tripling the size of the Border Patrol, it was likely to go down in quality.

Even before the growth started several years ago, prospective recruits came from all over the country to test for the agency because it was the easiest federal agency to get hired by. Most of the prospectie recruits I talked to wanted only to be hired and trained then to transfer laterally to other federal agencies because those jobs were harder to get hired into as recruits. So there, the quality of Border Patrol agents doesn’t rank high, nor do they keep many good rookies for they find better opportunities with other federal agencies. The winners in the El Paso situation are the jury that saw through the agents’ lies and the United States Attorney who prosecuted the case.

The losers are the usual suspects: The ignorant Minutemen, the Border Patrol agent union, its leader T.J. Bonner and all the idiotic ultra-conservative talk show hosts who have decried the convictions without a glimmer of evidence on their side. Include, also, the senior United States Senator from California, (Dumber than a palm tree) Dianne Feinstein, for she and other low-IQ congress people like House Judiciary Chairman, F. James Sensenbrenner, JUNIOR, have entered the fray to question the trial.

Who is right, Dianne or the jury of 12 citizens who heard and saw all the evidence and watched the demeanor of all witnesses? The true winner here is not a has-been Senator, but the jury system in the United States. Judges may get things wrong, cops and Border Patrol agents may be wrong, but unanimous juries of regular folks rarely are. In this case, the jury was right. The Border Patrol agents committed several felonies and must go to prison for a long time, if nothing else to show other officers that they simply can’t go around shooting people without cause, perjuring themselves and covering their crimes up.

Famed Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz labeled lying by cops on the stand to convict people they didn’t like or to cover up their own crimes, "testilying." I agree. This time, however, the jury saw through it and convicted the badge-wearing perpetrators, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean.

© 2006