Prison time haunts freed ex-agents

Former U.S. Border Patrol agent Ignacio “Nacho” Ramos wakes up in the middle of the night expecting a guard to shine a flashlight in his face. Jose Alonso Compean, his colleague, still has nightmares that he’s not really home.

It has not been easy readjusting to life outside their one-man prison cells, where they spent the last two years of their lives in segregation.

Since the commutation of their sentences by George W. Bush on his last day as president, the former agents, who were charged with the nonfatal shooting of a Mexican national after he abandoned a load of marijuana near the border, are learning to live in the world again.

Since being released from prison on Feb. 17, both men were confined to house arrest for 31 days and were barred from speaking to the news media until their sentences ended Friday.

In an exclusive interview with The Washington Times, the two men, now fighting to have their convictions wiped off the record, spoke of their ordeal since the incident in Fabens, Texas, in 2005 that changed their lives.

Mr. Ramos and Mr. Compean were convicted of causing serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence, and a civil rights violation. They were sentenced to 11 and 12 years in prison, respectively.

Mr. Ramos’ attorney, David Botsford, has asked the Supreme Court to review the convictions, and an answer as to whether the court will review the case is expected within a week, the agents said.

“It’s been tough,” Mr. Ramos said by telephone.

“Growing up as a kid, your parents tell you don’t do anything bad because you could end up in prison. I didn’t do anything bad, but there I was,” Mr. Ramos said. “I love my country, still do, and still I would sit in the prison cell [and] wonder: How did I end up in a place I never thought I would be in million years?

“But I had faith in God, I had my family, and I had so many people from across the country that never forgot about me. It pulled me through.”

The two men served their prison sentences from Jan. 17, 2007, until last month.

“I wake up sometimes out of my sleep and wonder what if,” Mr. Ramos said. “What if no one ever heard about my story? What if no one ever knew what really happened that day? We would still be sitting in prison. Our children wouldn’t have fathers, our wives wouldn’t have husbands.”

The Times has documented the plight of the agents in more than three dozen stories since October 2006. Several members of Congress called on Mr. Bush over the years to either pardon the agents or commute their sentences. At one point, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton in Texas, whose office prosecuted the case, said in an interview with The Times that the “punishment was high” but that Congress had mandated the sentences.

The case became a national cause celebre, with border security activists gathering the signatures of more than a half-million people asking the president to pardon or commute the sentences of the two men.

For Mr. Sutton and Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Kanoff, who successfully prosecuted the case, it was a matter of two federal officers violating the civil rights of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, a Mexican citizen who later was convicted of transporting marijuana across the border in a second load.

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