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.”
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