SAN DIEGO (AP) - The defense for a Marine sergeant being retried on a murder charge in a major Iraq war-crimes case told a military jury Wednesday that the case is based on no evidence, coerced statements from his squad mates and a shoddy investigation.
Attorney Christopher Oprison, representing Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III, said during his closing arguments at Camp Pendleton that there are doubts the body is even the correct one since it was exhumed more than a month after the killing.
“You don’t have to convict Sgt. Hutchins of anything,” Oprison told the jury of three enlisted and three officers.
Hutchins has had his conviction overturned twice by military courts after rulings that there were errors in the handling of his case. He served more than half of his 11-year sentence. Under the military justice system, the Navy was allowed to order his case to be retried.
The military’s highest court, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, ruled in 2013 that Navy interrogators in Iraq at the time violated his rights by holding him in solitary confinement for seven days without access to a lawyer.
Hutchins was convicted of murder in the death of a retired Iraqi policeman in the village of Hamdania in 2006. The six other Marines and a Navy corpsman in his squad served less than 18 months locked up.
All but one of his former seven squad mates has refused to testify again at his re-trial. Many have said they now do not stand behind the statements they gave to military interrogators in 2006.
Prosecutors in their closing arguments said the probe was thorough and proved Hutchins was behind the killing of 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad, and the scheme to plant an AK-47 rifle next to his bullet-riddled body to make it look like he was an insurgent.
Maj. Samson Newsome argued for the prosecution that investigators spent hours at the crime scene and in the village but were misled by Hutchins after he lied to them, saying the shooting of the man was justified because he had fired upon them and had been digging a hole for a roadside bomb. That cost military officers weeks in tracking down the crime, he said.
But investigators later secured the correct body, correct weapon and testimony from squad mates supporting allegations that Hutchins and his squad set out to find an Iraqi man to kill that April night, Newsome told jurors. Prosecutors said Hutchins shot the man three times in the face and then bragged to his squad mates about getting away with murder.
Newsome told the court his squad mates do not want to testify because they don’t want to “come in and talk about the disgusting thing they did.”
In their affidavits stating their refusal to testify, “they never claimed they didn’t murder the man,” Newsome said.
Hutchins has been in and out of the brig because of the rulings.
He was released briefly after a lower court overturned Hutchins’ conviction in 2010, ruling his trial in 2007 was unfair because his lead defense lawyer quit shortly before it began. But the military’s highest court at that time overruled that decision, saying the problem was not grave enough to throw out the conviction.
Then he was released again for a few months after the highest court ruled interrogators had violated his rights by keeping him in solitary confinement.
Prosecutors argued that Hutchins waived his right to counsel at the time and willfully told his side of the story without coercion.
Hutchins faces returning to the brig a third time, if four of six members of the jury find him guilty again of murder.
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