The conviction of Marine Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III for war crimes in 2006 has been overturned.
AP (“Murder conviction against US Marine overturned“):
The military’s highest court overturned a murder conviction against a Camp Pendleton Marine in one of the most significant cases against American troops from the Iraq war.
The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces threw out the conviction of Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III of Plymouth, Mass., who has served about half of his 11-year sentence. According to the ruling posted on the court’s website Wednesday, the judges agreed with Hutchins, who claimed his constitutional rights were violated when he was held in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for seven days during his 2006 interrogation in Iraq.
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The Navy can appeal to the Supreme Court or send the case to the convening authority, who can either order a retrial or let the ruling stand. Navy officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
In their ruling Wednesday, the court’s judges said the Naval Criminal Investigative Services violated Hutchins’ Fifth Amendment rights when it interrogated him in May 2006 about the incident and then put him in a trailer in Fallujah with no access to a lawyer or phones. After seven days, the same Navy investigator returned and asked Hutchins for permission to search his belongings. Hutchins said he asked to tell his side of the story and was told he could do so the next day, when he waived his right to counsel and provided a sworn statement about the crimes.
The judges ruled much of the case rested on that confession, which they determined was illegally obtained after Hutchins was held under guard for seven days. ”Accordingly, under the circumstances of this case, it was error for the military judge to admit the statement made by Hutchins on May 19, 2006,” the judges concluded in their ruling.
The case was among the most serious Iraqi war crimes prosecuted by the government. In another major case that took six years, the lone Marine convicted in the killings of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in a raid in Haditha seven years ago reached a deal to escape jail time.
Another case involved the November 2004 death of an unarmed Iraqi detainee in Fallujah. One Marine was spared prison time after pleading guilty to dereliction of duty, and another was acquitted. Their former squad leader was acquitted in federal court.
Former Navy officer David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said Wednesday’s ruling demonstrates the military’s poor prosecution record. ”For these very serious allegations of conduct that one would think of as war crimes, the military justice system has not performed very well in the past couple decades,” Glazier said. ”Here this guy’s conviction is overturned on the basis that he was mistreated by the government during his initial apprehension, and yet he’s already served five years in prison,” he added. “If the conviction was unjust in the first place, it’s kind of appalling it’s taken the military justice system five years to resolve it.”
If this comparatively benign violation of due process is sufficient to overturn the conviction of a confessed murderer, I don’t know how the shockingly egregious treatment to which Army PFC Bradley Manning was subjected to during his long pre-trail confinement wouldn’t have the same effect. Certainly, any statements by Manning to authorities during that period would have to be ruled inadmissible.
