Jonathan Kellerman - The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

Defense attorneys argued that these were administrative violations that did not amount to criminal behavior and tried to persuade the jury that Aldrete-Davila had been armed. As they saw it, the entry point of the bullet on the left side of his buttock proved that he had been turned at an angle-as if he were extending his arm back to point a weapon-when he was shot. The orthopedic surgeon who had removed the bullet would say only that he could not rule out the possibility. The defense had less success reconciling the contradictions in the agents’ testimony. Ramos claimed that he had heard gunfire while crossing the ditch and then found Compean lying on the ground as if wounded-a scenario that, if true, helped justify his shooting at the fleeing suspect. But Compean testified that he had stood up from a kneeling position after firing his gun, not fallen flat on his back. In closing arguments, Ramos’s attorney, Mary Stillinger, tried to establish reasonable doubt by emphasizing that Aldrete-Davila was “the only government witness that can testify that he did not have a gun.” (Oscar Juarez had not been able to see past the levee, where Aldrete-Davila was shot, to know if he had pulled a weapon.) “Everything depends on the credibility of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila,” Stillinger said. “Are you going to believe the admitted drug trafficker, or are you going to believe the agents?”

In the end, the case came down to the credibility of Ramos and Compean, whom the jury decided to convict on five out of six charges, rejecting only the most serious one: assault with intent to commit murder. On October 19, 2006, U.S. district judge Kathleen Cardone sentenced them to eleven and twelve years, respectively. Strict sentencing guidelines left her little latitude since one charge-discharge of a firearm in commission of a crime of violence-carried a mandatory ten-year term. The jury hadn’t known the penalties for each charge when it rendered its verdict, and three jurors would later sign affidavits for the defense saying that they had been pressured to vote with the majority at the end of the two-and-a-half-week-long trial; they had been holdouts to acquit on the assault and civil rights charges, though not on obstruction of justice. (The U.S. attorney’s office later issued a statement that read, “The jurors were polled in open court immediately after announcing their verdicts and all said without hesitation or equivocation that the verdicts were theirs.”) Prosecutors had offered plea deals to the defendants before trial, including an 18-month term for Ramos and 21 months for Compean, if they would plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges. It was a package deal that both men had to take and which they had declined. “It was simply the principle of the whole thing,” Ramos wrote to me. “I could have never lived that down.” (Compean, as well as Aldrete-Davila, declined to be interviewed for this article.) Ramos’s wife, Monica, put it more bluntly: “My husband was facing forty years, and they offered him eighteen months. Wouldn’t a guilty person take that?”

A female juror, who agreed to talk to me on condition of anonymity saw things differently. “We didn’t believe they had acted in self-defense,” she said. “I think Compean got mad and started shooting.” As for Ramos: “He was a marksman, and I think he knew he hit the alien. That’s why he only fired once.” During deliberations, she said, the jury had weighed the fact that the victim had been transporting a large load of marijuana. “We agreed that we weren’t trying the alien for what he did,” she recalled. “That wasn’t the case we were given.”

TWO MONTHS BEFORE Ramos and Compean were set to be sentenced, Lou Dobbs introduced the case to a national audience. “Tonight, two Border Patrol agents face twenty-year prison sentences,” he began. “They were prosecuted after pursuing a Mexican citizen illegally in the United States who tried to smuggle hundreds of pounds of drugs into this country. The drug smuggler has been given immunity…and guess who’s in jail?” Correspondent Casey Wian walked through the incident with Ramos, who recounted his version of events: hearing gunfire, finding his fellow agent lying on the ground, and then firing his weapon when the suspect pointed what appeared to be a gun. “[The public] entrusted me to stop a drug smuggler and I did,” he said. CNN’s viewers were never told that Ramos had failed to report the shooting, that Compean had tampered with key evidence, or that Aldrete-Davila had attempted to surrender-facts that were readily available to anyone who had read the indictment or newspaper coverage of the case. At the end of his report, an indignant Dobbs weighed in. “There should be an investigation of the U.S. attorney’s office who would even suggest that…an illegal alien drug smuggler caught with the goods has rights superior to those of the agents that we depend on to enforce the law,” he said. He promised his audience of nearly 900,000 viewers that “this broadcast will be following their story each and every day, and every step of the way, and we will be reporting to you on what in the world this government of ours is thinking.”

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.”