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.”
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
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