Need fora pardon
Bipartisan support grows to commute border agents’ sentences

Aug 3, 2007
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Credit goes to the Democratic Congress on at least one issue — committees in both the House and the Senate have held hearings on the unjust trial and sentencing of two border patrol agents. The outrage has been bipartisan.

Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., is the latest congressman to urge President Bush to commute the agents’ prison time, saying the 11- and 12-year prison sentences handed to ex-agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were "harsh, disproportionate, excessive."

The agents were brought to trial by an overzealous federal prosecutor, Johnny Sutton, who also gave immunity to an illegal alien drug smuggler. The drug smuggler, shot in the buttocks as he tried to flee the agents, is now suing the federal government for $5 million.

Rumors are flying whether the Mexican government influenced the prosecution. The Department of Homeland Security denies it, but some congressmen are suspicious.

What is known is the staff of Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner — working with Sutton’s staff — went to Mexico to offer the drug smuggler, Aldrete Davila, immunity for his testimony.

Doesn’t the inspector general’s staff have better things to do — say finding illegal aliens who have committed felonies in the U.S, and jailing them. It seems that federal employees went out of their way to defend a foreign criminal while prosecuting two border patrol agents. Yet it is the agents – who put their lives on the line every day to protect American citizens – who should certainly get every benefit of the doubt, not criminal drug smugglers.

Many Republican and Democratic congressmen are demanding clemency for the two agents. President Bush should agree and pardon the two. He should also remind the DHS that its staffers are supposed to be on the side of men and women with badges, not on the side of foreigners driving 700-plus pounds of marijuana into the United States.

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