There’s gotta be more to this story than meets the eye
This August story sounds too bizarre to be correct but, apparently, it is. It tells how two U.S. border control guards chased an illegal alien who was caught in the act of smuggling drugs into the US. One of the guards was wounded in a violent physical confrontation with the smuggler; the other shot the smuggler in the buttocks after he thought the bad guy had turned on him with a gun.
The smuggler’s mother, living in Mexico, complained, at which point the US granted immunity to the smuggler, paid his medical bills, and then instituted proceedings that ended with both guards getting more than a decade in prison. Apparently the guards erred by chasing the guy, by thinking he was shooting at them, and by removing shell casings from the ground:
At trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Debra Kanof told the court that the agents had violated an unarmed Aldrete-Davila’s civil rights. [My question — what kind $%&* civil rights does an illegal alien smuggling drugs into America have? I guess he has the same civil rights as the pampered flowers in Gitmo, who, after taking up arms against the US on foreign battlefields, now get to sit around at taxpayer expense eating fine foods, having their Korans handled with kid gloves, and assaulting US soldiers.]
“The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it is a violation of someone’s Fourth Amendment rights to shoot them in the back while fleeing if you don’t know who they are and/or if you don’t know they have a weapon,” said Kanof.
Kanof dismissed Ramos’ testimony that he had seen something shiny in the smuggler’s hand, saying that the agent couldn’t be sure it was a gun he had seen.
Further, Kanof argued, it was a violation of Border Patrol policy for agents to pursue fleeing suspects.
“Agents are not allowed to pursue. In order to exceed the speed limit, you have to get supervisor approval, and they did not,” she told the Daily Bulletin.
Those shell casings Compean picked up were described to the jury as destroying the crime scene and their failure to file an incident report – punishable by a five-day suspension, according to Border Patrol regulations – an attempted cover up.
The Texas jury came back with a guilty verdict. Conviction for discharging a firearm in relation to a crime of violence has an automatic 10-year sentence. The other counts have varying punishments. Ramos and Compean will be sentenced next month.
“How are we supposed to follow the Border Patrol strategy of apprehending terrorists or drug smugglers if we are not supposed to pursue fleeing people?” said Ramos, who noted that he only did on that day what he had done for the previous 10 years. “Everybody who’s breaking the law flees from us. What are we supposed to do? Do they want us to catch them or not?”
If this story really is accurate (and a recent, very sympathetic article in the Ontario, California Daily Bulletin indicates that it is), it highlights the fact that American border policy and our approach to the civil rights vested in illegal aliens committing crimes against this country have become huge jokes — with the last laugh falling on the American people. Let’s just give up the pretense and formally announce that we have an open border policy with no limitations on the number of new arrivals, and no concerns for criminal predilictions or murderous intent.
Incidentally, while trying to find more information about this story, I stumbled across a website dedicated to stopping the war against drugs. It reported this story as one in a series of corrupt cop stories. This too bewildered me. Despite characterizing these agents as “corrupt cops,” nothing in the story as reported on this hostile website accuses the agents of the usual hallmarks of corruption. Thus, there’s no claim that they were taking bribes, engaging in vigilante justice, hunting down innocents, murdering witnesses, blackmailing people, etc. Instead, it describes precisely the same scenario as the other news articles. That is, it notes that the border guards came across an illegal alien running drugs into our country, the alien violently assaulted one of them, and the agents then did what cops usually to do stop a violent criminal who appears to be holding a gun — they shot him. I feel as if I’m in Looking Glass Land (or Big Brother’s world of inverted language) when good police go to jail for attempting to capture manifest criminals in the act.
Hat tip: Don Quixote
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