EDITORIAL: Immunity from Justice
Attorney General Holder frees drug suspect and prosecutes lawman

The Washington Times
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Monday, November 21, 2011

Lady Justice has tossed aside her blindfold and tipped her scale. A border-crossing drug smuggler walks free while the officer who arrested him has been jailed. In the age of Obama, the law has been turned upside down.

U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jesus E. Diaz Jr. is set to spend the next two years behind bars after being sentenced last month for what the Justice Department called deprivation of an illegal-immigrant suspect’s constitutional right to freedom from the use of unreasonable force. The unnamed Mexican suspect, who was 15 at the time of his arrest in 2008, received immunity from drug-smuggling and illegal-entry charges for his testimony against the American Border Patrol agent who intercepted him near Eagle Pass, Texas.

Mr. Diaz was nailed for purportedly lifting the teenager’s handcuffed hands over his head and putting his knee in the boy’s back. His attorneys argued at trial that the suspect bore no evidence of injury and the only marks were caused by the shoulder straps of a backpack laden with marijuana found at the arrest site. The Mexican Consulate in Texas interviewed the suspect following the arrest. Based on his account, the Mexican government urged that the agent be prosecuted. U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s Justice Department did just that.

Outraged lawmakers sent a letter to President Obama on Thursday signed by 37 members of Congress and calling the prosecution of Mr. Diaz “unfair and excessively disproportionate.â€