Soldier Gets Life Sentence for Iraq Murders
Published: May 21, 2009
A jury in Kentucky sentenced a 24-year-old former soldier to life in prison without parole on Thursday for raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her, her parents and a younger sister in Iraq. The verdict spared the former soldier, Steven D. Green, capital punishment for a crime that spurred demands for retribution from Iraqis and raised questions about Army oversight of its most combat-stressed forces.
After deliberating for just one day, the 12-member jury sitting in Paducah, Ky., declared itself hung late Thursday afternoon, resulting in the lesser sentence, said Dawn Masden, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, based in Louisville.
The verdict seemed likely to anger Iraqis who had argued that Mr. Green and the other soldiers involved in the murders should have been tried by an Iraqi court and who had asserted that only a death penalty could satisfy the family and fellow villagers of the victims.
At least four other soldiers have pleaded guilty or were convicted in military courts for their roles in the rape and murders. While most of them received long prison terms, none are facing the death penalty, and all will be eligible for parole in 10 years or less.
Mr. Green’s trial was the first capital punishment case tried under a 2000 law allowing federal criminal courts to try crimes committed overseas by former members of the military, military dependents, contractors and other civilians, legal experts said. Mr. Green left the Army, with an honorable discharge on a diagnosis for a personality disorder, just weeks before he was arrested in 2006.
The March 2006 murders in Mahmudiya, a Sunni-dominated town 20 miles south of Baghdad, were so bloody that American and Iraqi authorities initially thought they were the work of insurgents. The American soldiers were implicated after at least one of them acknowledged to fellow soldiers a role in the crimes.
At the time, the Iraq insurgency was near its violent apex, and American forces were suffering heavy casualties. Private Green’s unit, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, was sent to a particularly violent area known by soldiers as the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad, soon after arriving in Iraq in the fall of 2005.
The battalion quickly took casualties, including a sergeant close to Private Green. In December, Private Green, along with other members of his platoon, told an Army stress counselor that he wanted to take revenge on Iraqis, including civilians. The counselor labeled the unit “mission incapable” because of poor morale, high combat stress and anger over the deaths, and said it needed both stronger supervision and rest. It got neither, testimony at Mr. Green’s trial showed.
On March 11, 2006, after drinking Iraqi whiskey, Private Green and other soldiers manning a checkpoint decided to rape an Iraqi girl who lived nearby, according to testimony. Wearing civilian clothing, the soldiers broke into a house and raped Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Soldiers in the group testified that Private Green killed the girl’s parents and a younger sister before raping and then shooting the girl in the head with the family’s own AK-47, which it kept for self defense.
At his trial, Mr. Green’s lawyers built a case intended less to deny his role in the crime than to plant questions about whether he deserved the death penalty.
Mr. Green, who was reared in Midland, Tex., came from a broken and chaotic home, defense witnesses testified, and despite scoring well on intelligence tests, was highly impulsive and did poorly in school. He got into the Army in 2005 on a so-called morals waiver, having had problems with alcohol and drug abuse.
On May 7, the same jury that issued the life sentence convicted Mr. Green on 17 counts, including premeditated murder.
During the sentencing phase of the trial, the Army stress counselor, Lt. Col. Karen Marrs, a mental health nurse practitioner, testified that then-Private Green was disturbed by deaths in his unit and had expressed a desire to hurt Iraqi civilians. But she also said that such sentiments had been expressed by other members of the unit and are not uncommon among troops in combat. On questioning from the prosecution, she also said that she thought Private Green clearly understood that hurting civilians would be wrong and that he had no plans to act on his anger.
The defense argued that the Army should have provided stronger leadership to Private Green’s unit, and should have removed Private Green from front-line duty for more intensive mental health care.
But the prosecution strenuously rejected that argument, saying that many combat troops face the same kinds of trauma and stress as Private Green and his platoon, but that few commit atrocities.
“The defendant failed to live up to his duty to protect the innocent people of Iraq,” Marissa Ford, one of the federal prosecutors, said near the beginning of the penalty phase.
Doug Green, 28, Mr. Green’s brother, told the Associated Press: “I do think it gives him a chance to have some semblance of a life. We’re grateful for that.”
