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Written by Bruce Daniels - ABQnewsSeeker
Friday, 08 December 2006
Ex-officers face 11- and 12-year sentences for wounding drug smuggler.

A group of 49 Congressmen, led by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., has written to President George W. Bush seeking a pardon or a commutation of the 11- and 12-year sentences imposed on two former Border Patrol agents for shooting a drug smuggler in the buttocks last year near Fabens, Texas.

According to the El Paso Times this morning, Rohrabacher said in a news release that he sent the letter, also signed by 48 colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives, to the White House on Dec. 6, imploring the president "to do the right thing and not allow the lives and families of these fine men to be destroyed this holiday."

Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, currently free on bond, must turn themselves in on Jan. 17 to serve, respectively 11 and 12 years in prison, after being convicted by a federal court jury in El Paso in October of violating the civil rights by shooting an admitted drug smuggler in the buttocks as he tried to flee across the Rio Grande in February 2005, according to earlier reports.

The men also were found guilty of tampering with evidence for failing to report the incident to their superiors and Compean also was convicted for tampering by collecting shell casings from the shooting, the Times reported.

"These Border Patrol agents are heroes," Rohrabacher said in his news release. Because of their actions, over a million dollars in illegal drugs were stopped from being sold to our children. Bringing felony charges against them is a travesty of justice beyond description. The president needs to send the right message by showing they are on the side of law enforcement, not drug traffickers."

But U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, who prosecuted the agents in El Paso, said at the time of the trial that they had fired on an unarmed suspect, according to a story in today's Orange County Register .

"Being a United States Border Patrol agent is not a license to shoot people," Sutton told reporters in October. "It is especially not a license to shoot unarmed ... suspects who are running away from you."

According to an item in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, Calif., reporter Sara Carter, who like the Times' Louie Gilot, has followed this case from the beginning, writes that Rohrabacher's letter is one of many sent to both the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seeking an independent investigation of the case and a pardon for the agents.

The White House has not responded, Carter writes.