The ballad of Ramos and Compean

Sept. 4, 2007 | Two years ago, in the Texas desert southeast of El Paso, two U.S. Border Patrol agents fired 15 bullets at a suspected drug dealer who was fleeing on foot toward the border. The man, a Mexican national, was hit once in the buttocks but made it across the Rio Grande. The agents who fired their weapons, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, were sentenced to more than a decade in prison for firing on an unarmed man and then trying to cover up the crime.

For the prosecutors and the jury, the shooting of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila near Fabens, Texas, was a clearly unlawful use of force. But the conviction of Ramos and Compean was just the beginning of the agents' story. Within months, they had become the center of a dubious political crusade that would energize the furthest reaches of the right, dominate one of CNN's most popular news programs, and persuade a quarter of the U.S. House of Representatives -- and one prominent Democratic senator -- to reject the findings of a federal court.

With the help of reporters and activists promoting -- and embellishing -- the defense's version of the case, the two convicted agents were transformed into martyrs for the battle against illegal immigration. Instead of rogue officers who shot a fleeing, unarmed suspect and then lied about it, they became stand-up cops who were forced to shoot an armed drug dealer and then sent to prison by a legal system run amok. After they went to prison in January 2007, they even became the tragic heroes of a country song called "Ramos and Compean."

Nearly 400,000 people have signed a petition demanding a presidential pardon for the agents. There are two bills to pardon them pending in Congress, one with more than 100 cosponsors, including five Democrats.

How did Ramos and Compean get reinvented as right-wing heroes? The answer lies in the way Americans get their information, from a fragmented news media that makes it easier than ever to tune out opposing views and inconvenient truths. When people seek "facts" only from sources with which they agree, it's possible for demonstrable untruths to enter the narrative and remain there unchallenged. The ballad of Ramos and Compean is a story that one side of America's polarized culture has gotten all wrong and that much of the other side -- and the rest of the country -- has never even heard.

Federal prosecutions of law enforcement agents are not undertaken lightly. "No prosecutor ever wants to be in a position of prosecuting a cop or a federal agent," says Johnny Sutton, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, whose office prosecuted Ramos and Compean. "They're our co-workers, they're our friends, we represent them in court ... But when one steps over the line and commits a serious crime, it's very important that they be held accountable ... [and] most agents would say what these guys did was outrageous."

Prosecutors in Sutton's office considered the conduct of Ramos and Compean outrageous enough that the two men were charged with seven and nine counts, respectively. Both were charged with assault with intent to commit murder. At trial, government prosecutors presented a case, supported by eyewitness testimony, that alleged the following: On Feb. 17, 2005, Aldrete-Davila led Border Patrol agents on a high-speed car chase that ended at a ditch about 120 yards from Mexico. Aldrete-Davila abandoned a van with 743 pounds of marijuana inside and made a dash for the border. Compean, on foot, intercepted Aldrete-Davila, who put his hands in the air to surrender.

At that point, according to trial testimony, Compean tried to hit Aldrete-Davila with the butt of his shotgun, missed, and fell into the 11-foot-deep ditch. Aldrete-Davila took off running. Compean climbed out of the ditch, shot at him 14 times and missed. Ramos, who had watched Compean fall, then fired once. The bullet entered Aldrete-Davila's left buttock, severed his urethra and came to rest in his right thigh. He fell down, but got back up, escaping across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The two agents then covered up the incident. Compean hid some of the shell casings and asked a third agent returning to the scene later that day to dispose of the rest. Neither Ramos nor Compean ever reported the shooting. They were arrested a month later, and then only because America's border with Mexico is like a very long and skinny small town. Aldrete-Davila's mother is friends with the mother-in-law of Rene Sanchez, a Border Patrol agent in Arizona. After hearing about the incident from his mother-in-law, Sanchez sent a report to the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, which then dispatched a special agent to Texas to investigate.

At trial in the federal courthouse in El Paso, Border Patrol agents from the Fabens station took the stand to testify against Ramos and Compean. Fellow agents, including one who had observed the shooting, contradicted Compean's story about where he was and how he was positioned when he fired his weapon. The agent who had helped Compean hide shell casings admitted it under oath. Prosecutors showed that Compean had repeatedly changed his story about the shooting and that it didn't match Ramos' account. They were also able to show that although Compean had discussed the shooting with other agents after it happened, it wasn't until his arrest that he began claiming that Aldrete-Davila had had a gun.

The prosecution's version of events was convincing enough for the jury, in March 2006, to find Ramos and Compean guilty of all but assault with intent to commit murder. Most media coverage of the case was local, and it comported with the jury's verdict: a bad shooting, a coverup and damning testimony from fellow agents that led to an uncontroversial conviction. Seven months later, a judge sentenced Ramos and Compean to 11 and 12 years in prison, respectively.

But by the time of their sentencing, the right wing had discovered the agents and begun constructing a new narrative. Ramos and Compean's newfound supporters soon settled on a radically different version of the shooting, cobbled together from speculation, rumors, misstatements of fact and various unproven assertions cherry-picked from the case the defense presented at trial.

In the right-wing version of the Aldrete-Davila case, the officers shot at the suspect because they feared for their safety. The agents' supporters say the fleeing suspect may, in fact, have been armed. In their scenario, Compean fell to one knee after trying to restrain Aldrete-Davila with the shotgun, and the suspect ran away. Compean then chased Aldrete-Davila and tackled him. Aldrete-Davila got away again. As Aldrete-Davila ran toward the border, he extended a gun behind him as if to fire, and Compean started shooting in self-defense. Ramos saw Compean on the ground, heard the shots and, believing his fellow agent shot or in danger, fired the bullet that hit Aldrete-Davila. Once the case went to trial, federal prosecutors supposedly manipulated witnesses and covered up Aldrete-Davila's misdeeds -- actually quashing a sealed indictment for drug smuggling -- in order to secure convictions of the two agents.

The story that Ramos and Compean's supporters constructed was essentially unchallenged by the mainstream media -- because the mainstream media wasn't paying attention. When traditional news outlets did cover Ramos and Compean, it was to comment on the right's fascination with the case, but not to examine or debunk the right's reporting.

Next page: The reinvention of Ramos and Compean begins with Andy Ramirez