[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 17167]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          THE PROSECUTION OF FORMER U.S. BORDER PATROL AGENTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. JONES of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, the House Judiciary 
Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing this week to examine mandatory 
minimum sentencing laws. Included in this hearing will be the 
opportunity to examine the issue of mandatory minimum sentencing in the 
case of U.S. Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean.
  As the Members of this House well know, in February, 2006, the two 
agents were convicted in a U.S. District Court in Texas for shooting a 
Mexican drug smuggler. They were sentenced to 11 and 12 years in prison 
respectively, and today is the 160th day since the agents entered 
Federal prison.
  The law that the agents were charged with violating, 18 United States 
Code, section 924(c)(1)(A), carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 
years. As enacted by Congress, the law requires a defendant to be 
indicted and convicted either of ``using'' or ``carrying'' a firearm 
during and in relation to the commission of a crime of violence or 
``possessing'' a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence.
  However, neither Mr. Ramos nor Mr. Compean were ever charged with 
specific elements of the crime. Instead, the Office of the U.S. 
Attorney for the Western District Court of Texas, Mr. Johnny Sutton, 
extracted from the U.S. Criminal Code a sentencing factor, 
``discharging'' a firearm, and substituted that sentencing factor for 
the congressionally defined elements of the offense. Ten years of each 
of their sentences were based on an indictment and conviction for a 
Federal crime that does not exist. The law they were charged with 
violating has never been enacted by the United States Congress but 
rather was fashioned by the U.S. Attorney's Office.
  In this case I can imagine how difficult it would be to obtain an 
indictment and conviction for ``using,'' ``possessing,'' or 
``carrying'' a firearm when the Border Patrol agents were required to 
carry firearms as part of their job. That difficulty may well explain 
why this U.S. Attorney's Office unilaterally changed Congress's 
definition of a crime to a definition that would be easier for the 
prosecution to prove.
  When this issue was brought to my attention and to the attention of 
my colleagues Virgil Goode and former Texas State Judge Ted Poe, we 
were pleased to join forces with the Gun Owners Foundation, U.S. Border 
Control, U.S. Border Control Foundation, and the Conservative Legal 
Defense & Education Fund to file a friend of the court brief in the 
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The brief urges reversal 
of these unjust convictions and 10-year mandatory minimum sentences by 
spelling out how charges contained in two counts of the indictment 
against the agents are fatally defective. I want to thank Chairman John 
Conyers for scheduling a hearing on this issue, as well as the 
Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism and Homeland Security for its 
willingness to investigate the injustice committed against these two 
border agents.
  I encourage the chairman and the committee to take a thorough look at 
the action of the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District 
of Texas and his aggressive prosecution of law enforcement officers 
like Ramos and Compean.
  Mr. Speaker, as I close, I want to let the families of Compean and 
Ramos know that we are not going to forget these two border agents. 
They are heroes and should never have been sent to prison.

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