A jury weighed the credibilities, and decided they believed the smuggler rather than the officers who tried to cover up their crime. It's called falsus in uno.
And what were the crimes they were convicted of?
The jury was not given all the information necessary to make that decision about credibility. The judge prohibited the defense from bringing up this guy's past and the fact that he had been arrested for drug smuggling even after this incident. BTW juries are composed of people who are generally too stupid to find an excuse or reason to get out of jury duty. And many jurors lie about whether or not they have prejudged a case just so that they can sit on a jury, especially in a high profile case, since there is the chance to hit the lottery with a book deal.
A prosecutor with an agenda and an unlimited budget can usually find a way to convict anyone of anything. If the Duke case had gone to trial, I suspect those white boys would have been convicted regardless of the lack of evidence. The jury would have ignored the forensic evidence and found a way to believe the lying prostitute.
Ramos, 37, and Compean, 28, were sentenced in October to 11- and 12-year prison terms for shooting Mr. Aldrete-Davila in the buttocks after he refused to stop his van and fled on foot into Mexico after abandoning 743 pounds of marijuana. He was located in Mexico by Homeland Security officials and returned to the U.S. under a grant of immunity to testify against the agents.
"The only way to conclude that Agents Ramos and Compean should have been prosecuted is if the word of the known drug smuggler is given more credence than the sworn statements of two law-enforcement officers," said Mr. Bonner, whose union represents all 11,000 of the agency's nonsupervisory personnel.
Are we from the same country? I believe my people (even if their wrong) over a drug smuggling POS. If you check the guards records, they’ve been up for border guard of the year. If they were rotten to the core, something else woud have turned up in their past. Biggest crime was not killing the POS with that one shot, then there wouldn’t be all this downtream activity, and the drug groups would have a lot more respect for the BP because they would know it’s okay to kill drug running POS, and that the government supports those for stopping problems.