Fed Law Enforcement Officers Assoc. Asks Bush to Pardon 2 Border Patrol Agents

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
WASHINGTON – The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) has fired off a letter to President Bush asking him to pardon or commute the sentence of two Border Patrol agents who shot a drug trafficker in the buttocks in 2005 near the El Paso-Mexico border.
“As you are aware, former U.S. Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean were convicted of federal violations related to a shooting incident with a known drug dealer, ” wrote J. Adler, president of the 26,000 member association, in a letter dated Dec. 19. “Although found guilty by a jury, their case is a classic example of the flaws in our justice system.”
The two agents were patrolling the Texas-Mexico border in 2005 when they stopped a man who had 743 pounds of marijuana in his vehicle. The man ran and the agents said they thought he had a gun. They fired their guns and the man was shot and wounded in the buttocks. The man later filed a complaint against the agents.
The two agents were convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Some Congress members have supported a campaign to free them.
Adler wrote in his 2 1/2 page letter that the two former agents are “family men who are now serving an inordinate period of jail time for a crime that, for the average criminal, would have met the federal guidelines for probation. To keep these two men incarcerated any longer violates the tenets of fairness, justice and the spirit of the law our system was founded upon.”

Read Letter

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