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Feds admit smuggler lied in Ramos-Compean case The U.S. government admitted today in federal court that the prosecution's star witness in the criminal trial of Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean – confessed drug dealer Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila – lied under oath. "He told some lies on the stand," Mark Stelmach, the assistant U.S. attorney representing prosecutor U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton said under questioning by a three-judge 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel in New Orleans. Ramos and Compean are appealing prison sentences of 11- and 12-years respectively for a 2005 incident in which they fired on Aldrete-Davila as he fled back into Mexico after smuggling 750 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. near Fabens, Texas. "Today the justice system worked the way it is supposed to," Tara Setmayer, communications director for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., told WND immediately following the hearing. Setmeyer, who attended the hearing, said, "I feel cautiously optimistic the judges will make a ruling quickly." "Based on the nature of the questions from the judges, it seems as though the government made their own bed and now they have to lie in it," she said. According to Setmayer, Judge Patrick Errol Higginbotham questioned Stelmach closely about why the prosecution had sought to seal from the jury information about a second smuggling attempt by Aldrete-Davila after Sutton's office gave him immunity and a border pass....
Another win for border agent who struck illegal Border Patrol Agent David Sipe scored another victory in his effort to prevent the U.S. Border Patrol from blocking his reinstatement with back pay to 2001. A top-level panel of three U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board administrative law judges, including Chairman Neil A. G. McPhie, rejected a government petition Friday to review the panel's June decision in favor of Sipe. As WND reported in June, Anna Love, an administrative judge with the Dallas Region of the Merit Systems Protection Board, ordered Sipe reinstated to his former Border Patrol position, with full back salary paid to April 21, 2001, the date the Border Patrol removed Sipe from his position and suspended his pay. The decision Friday gave the Border Patrol 60 days to pay Sipe his back pay, interest, and benefits due. Sipe was convicted in 2001 of criminal felony charges for striking illegal alien coyote Jose Guevara on the back of his head after Guevara struggled and resisted arrest. Sipe was prosecuted for abusing the civil rights of a human smuggler, or coyote, in an incident in which the government defended the coyote's civil rights. In April 2003, the federal district court agreed with Sipe's appeal and granted him a new trial based on assertions that federal prosecutors made misrepresentations and failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. On Jan. 26 this year, at his retrial, Sipe was acquitted after a jury reached a verdict in less than one hour. In Sipe's case, the government made a "sweetheart" deal with Guevara, giving him travel expenses, witness fees, free telephone use and a border crossing permit. Guevara also received a Social Security card and a driver's license, all in return for his testimony against Sipe. As reported by television and radio talk show host Glen Beck, Guevara ended up with an $80,000 government settlement and he reportedly used the proceeds to buy a ranch in Mexico....
Listen to Reason: The Bill of Rights Is a Package Deal The Supreme Court's decision to hear District of Columbia v. Heller (formerly known as the Parker case), provides a welcome opportunity to air out a subject that has grown musty from malign neglect. The case asks whether the District's ban on owning handguns, and its requirement that long guns be disassembled or stored with trigger locks, violates the Second Amendment. Any reasonable reading must conclude yes. (For the record, the Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.") But reasonable interpretations of the Constitution are rare in certain circles, so in the coming months the public will be told that the second item in a Bill of Rights written explicitly to pro tect individual liberties does not apply to individuals. In the reading of gun-control advocates, the Founders wrote the First Amendment to protect individual rights -- then took a wide detour exempting individual rights in order to preserve only a collective right to state militias . . . then doubled back to the protection of individual rights for the rest of the amendments. In this reading, "the people" means one thing in the First Amendment, something entirely different in the Second, and in the Fourth and Ninth Amendments reverts to the meaning used in the First. Even more oddly, in this reading the Founders used the term "the people" to refer to "the states" in the Second Amendment -- but took pains in the Tenth Amendment to draw an explicit distinction between the powers "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." (Why'd they do that? It's a complete mystery!)....
Carefully Plotted Course Propels Gun Case to Top Robert A. Levy, a rich libertarian lawyer who has never owned a gun, helped create and single-handedly financed the case that may finally resolve the meaning of the Second Amendment. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, District of Columbia v. Heller. Persuading the court to take its first look at the scope of the right to bear arms in almost 70 years is the culmination of a meticulous litigation strategy that was consciously modeled on the civil rights era and strenuously opposed by the gun lobby. “This is far bigger than — I won’t say than we ever imagined,” Mr. Levy said over coffee in a conference room at the Cardozo Law School in New York. “But it is as big as it can get.” Mr. Levy, 66, is a small man with a bald head, big ears and an impish smile. He talks very fast, but he is methodical in his logic and disarming in his candor. He was in town for a series of lectures and debates, and he explained how he and two other lawyers had constructed the case, which challenges Washington’s ban on handgun ownership, one of the strictest gun laws in the nation....