goose and gander.

I'm not surprised that CNN doesn't have the facts right about the Ramos/Compean case. I'm even less surprised that some Senator has his head up his ass about the whole case.

To wit: Border agents Ramos and Compean shot at a fleeing and unarmed suspected drug trafficker at the border, then covered up the shooting and lied about it. They were convicted in a court of law, and are now serving 11- and 12-year federal sentences, respectively.

There's a movement afoot to have the convictions overturned and/or the agents pardoned by the POTUS. Nobody speaking up for those agents seems to get the facts right.

The case is not about whether it ought to be right to shoot at fleeing felons at the border. It's not about the rights of cops and border agents to defend themselves against Mexican criminals. That's another debate, and it's completely irrelevant to this particular case.

Agents Ramos and Compean were convicted of shooting at an unarmed suspect fifteen times and then covering up the shooting. They also received a mandatory ten years in Club Fed for using a firearm in the commission of a crime. That's Federal law, friends, and stupid or not, it applies to everyone, not just the gangbanger doing a drive-by or robbing a Kwik-E-Mart. (That's the nature of law...once it's passed, it never takes long for someone to get that "pants around the ankles" look on their face and say, "But it was never supposed to apply to people like me!")

From the article, we learn that Senator Dianne Feinstein (Marxist-CA) wants to "change a law used by Sutton that required the agents receive at least 10 years for firing their weapons."

Oh, sure, mandatory firearms sentences are fine and dandy when some yokel from Oklahoma gets busted in NYC with a snubby in his front pocket, or some disadvantaged minority youth robs a convenience store, but they're unjust and in need of changing when the King's Men get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, right?

You know you're on the wrong side of an argument when you look next to you and see Dianne Feinstein on your side.

Don't want unintended consequences from mandatory sentencing? Don't want to see good folks go to jail for decades because those mandatory guidelines take discretion away from the judge? Then repeal the stupid law, or don't pass it in the first place.

That's what mandatory sentence laws are: the judiciary version of "zero tolerance" policies in public schools. They share all the same drawbacks, and they deserve the same kind of contempt. Alas, the same folks who rant against "zero tolerance" policies as a tool of the moonbat left also support mandatory sentence laws because it "gets the crackhead gangbangers off the street for a long time", and it won't allow those liberal activist judges to get soft on sentencing.