The US government will file new charges soon against Private First Class Lynndie England, whose guilty plea was thrown out and her court martial canceled on Wednesday over testimony by the convicted ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, an Army defense lawyer said on Thursday.
But the charges will have to be investigated anew in what the military calls an Article 32 hearing -- similar to a civilian grand jury but open to the defense and the public -- before England, 22, can go to trial, perhaps sometime this summer here at Fort Hood, said the lawyer, Captain Jonathan Crisp.
premature
He said it was premature to speculate about another guilty plea.
"We want an investigation from scratch," he said.
In the fallout from the mistrial, Crisp's civilian co-counsel, Richard Hernandez, resigned on Wednesday, citing financial reasons.
He had been working on the case for free for 11 months with his wife, a paralegal, "and just can't afford to do that any more," Hernandez said by telephone on his way back to Denver.
Crisp confirmed his partner's resignation but declined to discuss it.
He seemed visibly upset in court on Wednesday over Hernandez' direct examination of their star witness, Private Charles Graner Jr., whose testimony provoked the military judge, Colonel James Pohl, into ending the trial.
Graner is the ringleader serving 10 years in prison and the father of England's baby.
explanation
His explanation for a photograph showing England holding a crawling prisoner by a leash -- that it was a necessary way of removing an "assaultive" prisoner from his cell -- contradicted her earlier admission of guilt in the same episode.
That raised serious doubts about her plea, the judge ruled.
Hernandez said "there was no animosity -- we were both upset with the situation."
He said his decision to resign "was made with Lynndie's blessing" and disputed accounts by people close to the England family that they were unhappy with his representation. "We were in constant touch until we said goodbye."
The year-old prosecution now goes back to the beginning, and England is expected to remain at Ford Hood. Lieutenant General Thomas Metz, the base commander in whose hands the case now rests, has two sets of earlier charges to guide him: those preferred against England in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, last August and a later set that replaced them after an Article 32 hearing in Ford Hood in February.
Those nine charges, of conspiring with Graner and others to mistreat Iraqi prisoners and photograph them in sexually humiliating situations, carried a possible prison sentence of 16-and-a-half years.
RSS