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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (April 18, 2012)
News Soldier Chicks If Bales continues to refuse to participate in the sanity board, a judge could bar him from relying on a mental-health defense at his court martial don’t want the doctors taking on the role of investigators.” If Bales continues to refuse to participate in the sanity board, a judge could possibly bar him from relying on a mental-health defense at his court martial, Conway sug- gested. Browne also said Friday that one of the Army lawyers assigned to the defense team, Maj. Thomas Hurley, stepped aside in what Scan our QR code with your app. answers to three yes-or-no questions: Was the defendant suffering from a mental dis- ease at the time of the offense? Was the defendant able to appreciate the wrongness of his or her actions? Is the defendant cur- rently suffering from a mental disease and thus unable to understand the legal proceed- ings? The answers to those questions help pros- ecutors decide whether it’s fair to have the defendant stand trial, Ophardt said. If the answers are mixed, investigating officers Baby chicks are springing up around the city, where more and more homeowners are keeping hens for their eggs. Page 4 The Seattle Skanner April 18, 2012 Browne described as a mutual decision. The pair had disagreed about certain aspects of the defense strategy, and, Browne said, Hur- ley ultimately leaked an email from Browne to a news agency. The Army confirmed that Hurley was no longer on the defense team, but declined to say why. Capt. Anthony Osborne remains on the defense team. ONLINE can seek more information about the defen- dant’s mental state during a pretrial hearing or further psychiatric care for the defendant. However, if a defendant raises a mental health-related defense, prosecutors can obtain more of the details of the sanity board review, including any clinical inter- views with the defendant. It wasn’t immediately clear if the sanity board would proceed without Bales’ coop- eration. Bales, 38, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., is accused of walking off the base where he was deployed in southern Afghanistan with a 9 mm pistol and M-4 rifle outfitted with a grenade launcher. Officials say he walked to two local villages, where he killed four men, four women, two boys and seven girls, and then burned some of their bodies. Dan Conway, a former Marine who is now an experienced civilian military defense lawyer, said that while it may not be typical for the Army to record or allow a lawyer to attend sanity board reviews, it’s “perfectly reasonable, especially in a case of this magnitude.” “You want to be very cautious in allowing a client to be subject to that sort of clinical interview,” Conway said. “It’s his client sit- ting alone with a bunch of doctors. You theskannermobile.com The sanity board had been expected to explore such issues as Bales’ deployment history, including a concussion that Browne has said he suffered during one of his three prior deployments to Iraq, as well as any prescription medication he may have been taking and whether some sort of psychotic episode led to the shooting. In most cases, the only information given to prosecutors following a sanity board review consists of a brief diagnosis and the PHOTO BY LISA LOVING continued from page 1
