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.”
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
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SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
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