US Defense attorney Darren Wolff pointed toward the witness and laid responsibility for the crime at his feet.
“You could have stopped it? You could have stopped that whole thing from happening?” Wolff asked James Paul Barker.
“Yes,” said Barker, a former soldier with the 101st Airborne Division.
The moment shows how the legal team for former private first class Steven Dale Green is defending him on more than a dozen charges over the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and the killing of her family in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, in March 2006.
A jury convicted Green of all the charges on Thursday, including eight that carry a possible death sentence. Prosecutors say they would ask a jury to impose the death penalty on Green in the penalty phase of the trial, which was scheduled to begin yesterday.
That’s where Wolff and his co-counsel, Patrick Bouldin and Scott Wendelsdorf, have focused their efforts.
“The goal has always been to save our client’s life,” Wolff said after the verdict. “And now we’re going to go to the most important phase, which is the sentencing phase and we’re going to accomplish that goal.”
Rather than swim against a tide of evidence and testimony from a group of coconspirators, including Barker, who have already acknowledged their guilt, the defense team focused not on whether Green is guilty, but on spreading responsibility for the crime to avoid a death sentence.
In doing so, they’re banking on the idea that the nine-woman, three-man panel will decide that Green shouldn’t be put to death because so many people were to blame for the events leading up to the attack.
“There’s a concept called residual doubt,” said University of Kentucky law professor Roberta Harding, who is not involved in the case. “It’s the idea that, while they’ve found someone guilty, enough doubt remains that they don’t deserve to be sentenced to death.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
RSS