The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (14 page)

Dobbs made good on his pledge, highlighting the case on no fewer than 131 broadcasts in the eleven months that followed, including an hour-long special called “Border Betrayal.” Rather than delve into the specifics of the case, the show gave ample airtime to a rotation of family members, defense attorneys, lawmakers, and anti-illegal immigration activists who argued that the agents should never have been prosecuted. Dobbs injected his own nativist bent into the conversation, as when he reflected on whether the federal government had prosecuted Ramos and Compean because of “the influence of a powerful drug cartel” or was “blighting the lives of these two outstanding Border Patrol agents to appease the government of Mexico.” Wian's reporting was no less melodramatic. “These two brave Border Patrol agents, who were only trying to do their job, are going to prison,” he announced after they were sentenced. Viewers were given information about how to donate to the agents' defense funds and asked to respond to opinion polls whose loaded questions were foregone conclusions. (“Do you believe the Justice Department should be giving immunity to illegal alien drug smugglers in order to prosecute U.S. Border Patrol agents for breaking administrative
regulations?” Dobbs asked. “Yes or no?”) The results, announced at the end of each broadcast, were always the same: At least 90 percent of callers sided with the agents.

Dobbs defended his show's coverage of the case when I spoke with him this June, describing himself as an “advocacy journalist.” He explained, “The role of our broadcast is to put forward the facts on a host of issues that are often disregarded by mainstream media. My role is not to be neutral. I've always said that the price of objectivity is neutrality, and when it comes to the well-being of the American people or the national interest, I am incapable of objectivity. I bring to my audience issues that are carefully researched and reported.” When I asked Dobbs about specific facts that his program had omitted from its coverage, he said, “I believe the lack of accuracy and comprehensiveness is really an appropriate charge for the U.S. attorney.”

That did not keep the
Wall Street Journal
from denouncing Dobbs in an editorial for “weigh[ing] in repeatedly with pseudo-reporting designed to rile up his viewers rather than inform them of the facts.” (“Turning felons into political causes is the kind of stunt usually pulled by the likes of Al Sharpton,” the
Journal
added.) Fox News devoted less time to the case than CNN, and for the most part, the network struck a more skeptical tone. “We are a nation of laws,” Bill O'Reilly reminded Tom Tancredo, when the Colorado congressman came out in favor of presidential pardons for Ramos and Compean on
The O'Reilly Factor.
“These agents…shot the guy in the butt when he was running away.” But online, their case became a rallying cry, championed by conservative bloggers, anti–illegal immigration networks like Grassfire.org, and news sites such as WorldNetDaily.com, which saw the agents' prosecution as further proof that the Bush administration was lax on border security and supported a “pro-amnesty” agenda. Grassfire.org, which gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures for a petition advocating that the agents be pardoned, issued a press release citing the “unbreachable chasm” between its supporters and the Bush administration over the
case. “All the talk of fences and high-tech equipment is cheap,” the press release read. “When it came time to stand and be counted on the side of our border agents, the President's administration chose to side with a career illegal alien drug smuggler.”

As frustration with the prosecution built and was amplified on talk radio, Republican lawmakers who had staked their reputations on tough border-enforcement policies joined in, assailing the administration for not issuing the two agents a pardon. “Today is a day of infamy and disgrace,” announced California congressman Dana Rohrabacher in January, after Ramos and Compean reported to federal prison. “Shame on you, President Bush. You have betrayed us and our defenders.” He later threatened to call impeachment hearings if either man was killed in prison. U.S. representative Ted Poe, a former Houston judge who was famously tough on crime, argued in a series of interviews that “the government was on the wrong side” and should never have prosecuted the agents. He was not the only longtime Bush loyalist who was quick to align himself against the government's case. During televised hearings in April on the controversial firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Senator John Cornyn spent part of his allotted time pressing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to say whether he would agree to cooperate if the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the agents' prosecution. (In July the committee took up the question of whether the agents' sentences were excessive.) California congressman Duncan Hunter won an enthusiastic round of applause at the Republican presidential debate in June when he said that he would pardon the agents immediately. A bill Hunter introduced, which calls for the agents' convictions to be vacated, was signed by one hundred members of Congress.

Fueling anger over the case was a sealed government document that Ramos and Compean's supporters heralded as “exculpatory evidence”: a DEA report that Judge Cardone had ruled as inadmissible at trial. The report, which was leaked to the press earlier this year, stated that on October 23, 2005—eight months after the
shooting—the occupant of a stash house near Fabens claimed that a man he identified as Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila had dropped off a van containing 752 pounds of marijuana. The DEA had seized the drugload, but Aldrete-Davila has not been charged. Whether he has not been prosecuted because of a false eyewitness identification, insufficient evidence, or any other reason is unclear; since the report remains under seal and is part of an ongoing federal investigation, the U.S. attorney's office cannot comment on the case. (It did issue a statement that read, in part, “This office will pursue criminal charges where there is prosecutable criminal activity and competent evidence to prove it.”) Critics pounced, charging that the government had given Aldrete-Davila a free pass so that he would not be further tarnished before trial. “It is obvious that U.S. attorney Johnny Sutton knowingly presented a false picture of the drug smuggler in order to justify his ruthless prosecution of Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean,” said Rohrabacher. Still, whether Aldrete-Davila was a veteran trafficker or a first-time drug mule on the day he was shot, the facts that had convicted Ramos and Compean remained the same.

Stirring even more outrage was the news that Aldrete-Davila had filed a $5 million claim against the federal government to cover the cost of future medical expenses. And then, after an episode of
America's Most Wanted
focused on the case in February of this year, Ramos was attacked in prison. Federal officials were quick to point out that Ramos had asked to be placed in general population and had escaped with minor cuts and bruises. But Web sites that followed the case cast the incident in a more sinister light, reporting that he had been beaten by five inmates who had shouted, “
Maten a la migra
” (“Kill the Border Patrol”). Soon the blogosphere was buzzing with proof of yet another injustice; four Texas congressmen announced that the Department of Homeland Security had misled them during a briefing the previous September, when the lawmakers had sought to determine whether the government's prosecution of the agents had been
warranted. According to the congressmen, the department's Office of Inspector General had informed them that Ramos and Compean had made several damning admissions to investigators: that they had known Aldrete-Davila was unarmed and that they had “wanted to shoot a Mexican.” U.S. representative John Culberson, of Houston, wondered if the agency's misrepresentations had been deliberate. “In my opinion, this false information was given to members of Congress to throw us off the scent and cover up what appears to be an unjust criminal prosecution,” he said.

In the resulting furor, U.S. attorney Johnny Sutton made the rounds of talk shows to defend his office's prosecution of the two agents, offering an impassioned argument for why Ramos and Compean should be punished for their actions. As he tried to make his case to his critics, he became the target of their collective anger. “Dear Mr. President,” began an open letter that Phyllis Schlafly, the founder of the Eagle Forum, wrote to Bush in April. “I am glad to see that you fired some U.S. attorneys. But you missed one: U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton.” Rohrabacher, who called for Sutton's resignation, accused him of being “a PR man for the drug lords.” Photos of the prosecutor began to appear on the Internet, embellished with horns and the word “traitor” scrawled across his forehead. On talk radio and anti-illegal immigration Web sites, his detractors characterized him as “treasonous,” “corrupt,” “ruthless,” “an agent of the Mexican government,” “public enemy number one,” and “pure evil.” Blogs were filled with blistering attacks. “Shame on you, Sutton!” went a typical post. “Since when do illegal invaders to the USA have rights?” Or another: “Drop dead Johnny Sutton…This is the most wetback-loving administration this country has ever had!”

 

“O
N THE DAY
that everything happened, I was reacting to and trusting the actions of my fellow agent,” Ramos told me from the medium-security penitentiary where he was being held in Yazoo
City, Mississippi, in the half-hour that the Federal Bureau of Prisons allotted us to talk by phone. “If Mr. Compean felt that his life was in imminent danger and that he needed to pull his weapon and fire, I had to trust him. I had to make a split-second decision after hearing all those gunshots. I saw the smuggler turn around and make a threatening gesture at me, and I fired. At that moment, I felt he had a gun.”

I had hoped to better understand Ramos's actions that day, and as he relayed his account of the shooting, he was persuasive. To hear him tell it, he had faced the sort of terrifying moment that might happen only once in a federal agent's career; he needed to use deadly force because he had believed that his life, and Compean's, was on the line. But the same question nagged at me that had bothered me from the very beginning: Why, with such a compelling story, had he not simply reported the shooting? Why keep quiet instead? His answer, which deflected the blame to his supervisor, struck me as disingenuous. “I guess I should have gone straight to Richards and told him, but he already knew,” Ramos said. “Everyone was standing around the van, including Richards, talking about hearing shots fired. If I had told him to his face, he wouldn't have any plausible deniability, like he does now.” (This contradicted the sworn testimony of Richards and the other agents who were present.) Besides, he wondered, what good would telling his supervisor have done? “The smuggler was gone,” he said. “There was nothing we could do about him anymore.”

“If they had come forward and said, ‘A dope dealer just pointed a gun at us, and we shot at him fifteen times,' no grand jury in America would ever have indicted them for that,” Sutton observed one afternoon as we talked at the U.S. attorney's office in Austin, overlooking the Capitol. “But we don't hear about a ‘shiny object' until a month later. They knew they had shot him, and they knew he was unarmed. So instead of reporting the shooting, they covered it up, destroyed evidence, lied about it,
and filed a false report. A prosecutor can't say, ‘That's acceptable behavior,' and look the other way.”

Sutton, who served as Bush's criminal justice policy director when he was governor and worked on his transition team at the Department of Justice after the 2000 election, was an unlikely target for conservatives. He had been devastated by the letter from Schlafly, whom he described as “a conservative icon.” He insisted that he was not soft on drug crimes, as his detractors had made him out to be, pointing out that his office led the nation last year in narcotics prosecutions and was second in illegal immigration cases. Yet he has received death threats for his role in the case, and his e-mail and voice mail are often filled with irate messages. “All people have heard is that two American heroes are in prison for doing their job and that a drug dealer has been set free,” he said. “If those were the facts, I'd be furious too. But the evidence is overwhelming that these guys committed a very serious crime.” If anyone was at fault for the fact that Aldrete-Davila was not in prison, he said, it was the agents. “They didn't put handcuffs on him when they had the chance,” he explained. “They had him at gunpoint, at the bottom of a steep ditch, with his hands in the air. Instead of apprehending him, Compean tried to hit him over the head with the butt of a shotgun. Even after they shot him, they holstered their weapons and walked away.”

Sitting beneath half a dozen framed photos of himself with the president over the years, Sutton marveled at how media coverage had allowed the case to take on a life of its own. Lou Dobbs and others “with big microphones,” he noted, had repeatedly reminded viewers that Ramos had been nominated by his co-workers in 2005 for Border Patrol Agent of the Year. Yet they never mentioned that he had been arrested two times for domestic violence, in 1996 and 2002, and suspended from the Border Patrol, in 2003, for not reporting what had happened. (The charges were dropped, but Ramos was required to take a court-mandated anger management class.) More frustrating, he said, were the allegations
that he was eager to lock up Border Patrol agents for doing their jobs. “Agents have shot their weapons at least fourteen times in the El Paso sector since I've been U.S. attorney,” Sutton said. “On three occasions, they killed the suspect. Every time, the agents came forward and explained why they had used deadly force. And in every instance—except this one—it was ruled justifiable.”

It was a case like
U.S.
v.
Ramos and Compean
, he said, where the defendants were federal agents, that tested our most basic principles. “What makes America great is the rule of law,” he said, leaning forward in his chair to emphasize his point. “It applies to everyone, no matter how powerful or important they may be. We give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt because they have to make extraordinarily difficult decisions in life-or-death situations. But when they do wrong, they have to be held accountable.”