Senate to Probe Border Agents Case
Fred Lucas
(CNSNews.com) - The Senate will hold a hearing next week investigating the controversial case of two U.S. Border Patrol agents sentenced to more than a decade each in prison for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security will hold a hearing next Tuesday with a witness list that could include U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton of the Western District of Texas, who prosecuted the two border agents.

However the witness list is not yet finalized, said Gail O'Conner, spokeswoman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the subcommittee, told Cybercast News Service on Wednesday.

Feinstein has expressed concerns about the case in the past and has asked the Justice Department why the sentences for agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were so severe.

"These men were given sentences that some individuals who are convicted of murder wouldn't receive," Feinstein said in her letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) last February while asking for a hearing.

As Cybercast News Service previously reported, the episode began in early 2005, when Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila drove across the Mexican border into Fabens, Texas, in a van later found to be carrying 743 pounds of marijuana.

Ramos and Compean shot at him a total of 15 times. Aldrete-Davila was hit just once, in the buttocks, before escaping on foot back into Mexico.

Federal prosecutors sought Aldrete-Davila out not to charge him for smuggling, but to offer him an immunity deal to return to the United States as the star witness in the case against the two border agents.

The case sparked a national outrage, with Republicans demanding President Bush pardon the two agents.

Sutton has argued that Aldrete-Davila was unarmed and that the two agents did not know he was a drug smuggler at the time they shot him. He said the case was a matter of upholding the rule of law.

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