Badges of Dishonor: Video Extra 
Badges of Dishonor
On a desolate stretch of the Rio Grande, two Border Patrol agents chased a fleeing suspect and opened fire, wounding him from behind. But they didn’t arrest him, and they didn’t report the shooting to their supervisors. In fact, they covered it up. So why are they being celebrated as heroes?
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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!”
“On 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.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that these guys committed a very serious crime,” Sutton said.
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.”
His message fell on deaf ears on the last day of June, when roughly two hundred protesters amassed outside his San Antonio office to demand his resignation. Volunteers with the Minutemen and other anti-illegal immigrant organizations gathered on a grassy hill below the federal building holding handmade signs that read “Deport Johnny Sutton,” “Johnny Sutton: Best Justice the Peso Can Buy!” “Free Our Heroes!” “Prosecute Invaders, Not Defenders,” and “Amnesty for Ramos and Compean.” American flags fluttered in the breeze beside posters that pictured Sutton wearing devil’s horns. A woman walked through the crowd dragging a Mexican flag on the ground, asking people around her to step on it. A biker in an “America: Love It or Leave It” T-shirt shouted at the handful of counterprotesters across the street, who held up “Bad Cops Belong in Jail” and “No One Is Above the Law” placards. “Where are your green cards?” he yelled. “Go back to Mexico!” others screamed. A succession of speakers called for Sutton to step down, including Monica Ramos, whose husband, like Compean, is appealing his conviction.
Before the demonstration came to a close with the Pledge of Allegiance, a protester climbed into the back of a pickup and grabbed a bullhorn. “There are four kinds of boxes—the soapbox, the jury box, the ballot box, and the cartridge box,” he roared. “We have seen a misuse of the jury box. We’re going to use the ballot box to get rid of you. But don’t test our use of the last box.”
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