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Back in December, I blogged about two border guards who had gotten ten year terms for chasing down illegal aliens smuggling drugs into the country. Rather presciently, I titled my post “There’s gotta be more to this story than meets the eye.” Turns out there is. I’ll quote here the background story that I wrote in my earlier post, because it spells out what was exercising everyone at the time:

Two U.S. border control guards chased an illegal alien who was caught in the act of smuggling drugs into the US. One of the guards was wounded in a violent physical confrontation with the smuggler; the other shot the smuggler in the buttocks after he thought the bad guy had turned on him with a gun. The smuggler’s mother, living in Mexico, complained, at which point the US granted immunity to the smuggler, paid his medical bills, and then instituted proceedings that ended with both guards getting more than a decade in prison. Apparently the guards erred by chasing the guy, by thinking he was shooting at them, and by removing shell casings from the ground.

I now have it on good authority that the guards’ conduct was a little more extreme than removing shell casings from the ground. Had they behaved as they did in any context other than dealing with illegal aliens, it would have been manifest that they were merely corrupt cops, and no one would have squawked on either side of the political aisle about the government’s eventual decision to prosecute.

I don’t know about the violent physical confrontation (I didn’t get that info from my source), but the guards’ sob story starts to break down regarding the chasing and the shooting. To begin with, border guards aren’t authorized to give chase. It may be a stupid rule, but it’s the rule. As it is, these guards did give chase, firing as they went. It would have looked like a Keystone Kops slapstick, if it hadn’t been for the fact that, not only did they wound one guy when shooting him in the back (that is, after all, where those buttocks are lodged), they killed the other guy the same way. Also, it wasn’t just a couple of shots to protect themselves from possible return fire. Instead, the guards fired 14 shots at the bad guys’ retreating backsides.

All of that might have been a sustainable situation — cops do make mistakes in the heat of the moment — if the guards hadn’t gone out of their way to cover up the crime. They didn’t just remove the shell casings from the ground, which sounds like mere housekeeping, or careless crime scene control. Instead, they carefully collected all of the casings they could find and tried to dispose of them forever by dumping them into a river. That’s a crime, plain and simple. They also tidied up the scene in a way that removed any connection between the aliens they’d shot and the drugs those same aliens were trying to smuggle in.

This last point is important, because there was a whole lot of screaming about the fact that, at the end of the day, the U.S. didn’t prosecute the surviving drug smuggler for his crime. The fact is, the U.S. couldn’t. Although everyone knew that the guy was guilty, that he’d smuggled drugs before and that he’d smuggled drugs on that fateful day, there wasn’t any admissible evidence left. In that regard, remember that, in American criminal courts, there’s a big difference between knowing someone is guilty and proving he is. Even in a less enlightened civil rights era, the government was hamstrung when it came to Al Capone. Knowing that he was one of the greatest crime kingpins in America didn’t mean there was any useful evidence. As you may recall, the government finally was able to imprison him by proving (not just knowing about) tax evasion.

At the end of it all, if my authority is correct (and I have very good reason to believe it is), the U.S. government did the right thing, which was to prosecute corrupt cops. The latter, if allowed to flourish are a plague upon, and will eventually destroy entirely, a functioning criminal justice system.

To me, the whole story is a good reminder that media drivebys can occur on both sides of the political spectrum as different political interests seek to advance their agenda before the American public. I think the liberal side of the media has a greater problem with this because they have more access to media outlets, but that doesn’t make them the only ones guilty of misrepresenting the facts in order to score political points.

[Discuss This Topic With Bookworm and Welcome Her Back From Vacation!]

Ignacio Ramos Jose Alonso Compean

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