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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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