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Thread: Charges Expected to be Filed This Week Against Army Sergeant Accused of Murder

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    Quote Originally Posted by Peter1469 View Post
    If orders come "down" to influence the officer that makes the charging decision, and if that comes out, there would be a good chance that a military judge would dismiss the case with prejudice.
    Isn't that the crux of the matter? People are people after all and there are ambitious ones everywhere, starting with the Commander in Chief and working down.

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    That would be scandalous to boot.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    What kind of trial would this be? This would be under different laws, no?
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


  4. #14
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    It is going to be a general court-martial conducted under the rules of the Manuel for Courts-Martial. It will be more fair than a trial in civilian criminal court.

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    Mister D (03-18-2012)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Peter1469 View Post
    It is going to be a general court-martial conducted under the rules of the Manuel for Courts-Martial. It will be more fair than a trial in civilian criminal court.
    Why would it be more "fair"?

    Is it because it doesn't depend on the best lawyer money can buy?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Conley View Post
    Why would it be more "fair"?

    Is it because it doesn't depend on the best lawyer money can buy?
    Something along those lines, I believe. I was thinking it's more "fair" as in just. Less games etc.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    Sgt. Bales preliminary hearing ends with recommendation of death penalty...

    Preliminary hearing ends in Afghan massacre case
    Nov 13,`12 -- Army prosecutors on Tuesday asked an investigative officer to recommend a death penalty court-martial for a staff sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a predawn rampage, saying that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales committed "heinous and despicable crimes."
    Prosecutors made their closing arguments after a week of testimony in the preliminary hearing. Prosecutors say Bales, 39, slipped away from his remote base at Camp Belambay in southern Afghanistan to attack two villages early on March 11. Among the dead were nine children. The slayings drew such angry protests that the U.S. temporarily halted combat operations in Afghanistan, and it was three weeks before American investigators could reach the crime scenes. "Terrible, terrible things happened," said prosecutor, Maj. Rob Stelle. "That is clear."

    Stelle cited statements Bales made after he was apprehended, saying that they demonstrated "a clear memory of what he had done, and consciousness of wrong-doing." Several soldiers testified that Bales returned to the base alone just before dawn, covered in blood, and that he made incriminating statements such as, "I thought I was doing the right thing." An attorney for Bales argued there's not enough information to move forward with the court-martial. "There are a number of questions that have not been answered so far in this investigation," attorney Emma Scanlan told the investigating officer overseeing the preliminary hearing.

    Scanlan said that it's still unknown what Bales' state of mind was the evening of the killings. An Army criminal investigations command special agent had testified last week that Bales tested positive for steroids three days after the killings, and other soldiers testified that Bales had been drinking the evening of the massacre. "We've heard that Sgt. Bales was lucid, coherent and responsive," Scanlan said in her closing argument. "We don't know what it means to be on alcohol, steroids and sleeping aids."

    The investigating officer said Tuesday that he would have a written recommendation by the end of the week, but that is just the start of the process. That recommendation goes next to the brigade command, and the ultimate decision would be made by the three-star general on the base. There's no clear sense of how long that could take before a decision is reached on whether to proceed to a court-martial trial. If a court-martial takes place, it will be held at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the Washington state base south of Seattle, and witnesses will be flown in from Afghanistan.

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    Army Seeks Death Penalty for Bales...

    Army Seeks Death Penalty in Afghan Massacre
    Nov 14, 2012 - But defense cites toxic mix of drugs, alcohol in stressful environment
    A military prosecutor on Tuesday said the evidence against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, presented over the last week here in a pretrial inquiry into the killings of 16 Afghan civilians, was so damning that the case should go forward as a capital crime. “Terrible, terrible things happened — that is clear,” said the prosecutor, Maj. Rob Stelle. “The second thing that is clear,” he added, “is that Sergeant Bales did it.”

    But a lawyer for Sergeant Bales, Emma Scanlan, making the defense team’s final argument, said the lingering questions about the crime, and especially the defendant’s mental and physical state, were far too great to proceed with anything but caution. “Alcohol, steroids and sleeping aids,” Ms. Scanlan said, citing the prosecution’s own evidence about what Sergeant Bales, an 11-year Army veteran, may have had in his system in the early morning hours of March 11 when two villages in Kandahar Province were attacked. What would a $#@!tail of substances like that do to a man’s mind, Ms. Scanlan asked the court, in the “kinetic and high-pressure” environment of a combat zone? “We don’t know,” she said.

    The Army has charged that Sergeant Bales, 39, who was serving his fourth combat tour, walked away from his remote outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in a nighttime ambush in the villages. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children. In the decade of military conflict since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 2001, it was the deadliest war crime attributed to a single American soldier, with consequences that rippled through relations between the American and Afghan governments.

    The hearings here, called an Article 32 investigation, beyond offering the first open-court airing of the evidence, are also intended to provide a sort of road map for where prosecutors might go from here in seeking a military trial. The investigating officer who presided over the inquiry, Col. Lee Deneke, said on Tuesday that he would have a written opinion by the end of the week. Higher-ups in the Army, in making a final determination, are not bound by the colonel’s findings, however. The military has not executed a service member since 1961.

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