HispanicVista Columnists
Border Patrol Criminals and Criminality
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By
Raoul Lowery Contreras/HispanicVista.com - October 1, 2006
Border Patrol Criminals and Criminality
By Raoul Lowery Contreras
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 prospective 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.
Contreras’ books, THE ILLEGAL ALIEN: A DAGGER INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA?? and A HISPANIC VIEW OF AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION are available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com