A retired Army lieutenant who prosecuted Robert Bales — one of eight ex-servicemen and Blackwater security guards convicted of war crimes now seeking pardons or clemency from President Donald Trump — says he should never get it.
Bales, a former staff sergeant, pleaded guilty in 2013 to killing 16 Afghan men, women, and children, and last week his lawyer, John Maher, admitted to Military.com the pardon request is "admittedly a long shot," but "we’d be remiss if we didn’t try."
Bales, 45, entered his guilty plea in a general court martial to avoid the death penalty; he was charged with going off alone at night from his base in Afghanistan's Kandahar province in 2012 to kill three Afghan men, four women, and nine children, including a two year old, Military.com reported. Then he set fire to the bodies.
He’s serving a life term without parole in a maximum security section of a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
In a Dec. 2 petition to Trump filed with the Justice Department's pardon attorney, Maher asked the president to "disapprove the findings and the sentence in this court-martial, or grant a full and unconditional pardon, or commute the present sentence to 20 years confinement."
On Tuesday, retired Army Lt. Col. Jay Morse, in a commentary for Military.com, said even the "chance, however remote, that the president might consider pardoning" Bales "should be shocking to all Americans."
"The pardoning of convicted war criminals puts our national security at risk, is contrary to our vaunted American ideals of justice and is an affront to every honorable service member," he wrote. "These men are not heroes."
Morse asserted that Bales’ legal assertion that "no one ever determined" if he was "in his right mind" is "to use a printable legal term: Hogwash.
"His mental condition was assessed multiple times, by the defense team as well as ours," he wrote.
"Every accused service member deserves a defense, and every convicted criminal, no matter how horrific their crime, deserves the full benefit of due process," Morse wrote. "They do not, however, deserve their own set of alternative facts."
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