SEATTLE — The United States Army will seek the death penalty against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is accused of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan, officials said on Wednesday.
Sergeant Bales’s court-martial will consider 16 counts of premeditated murder, six counts of attempted murder and seven counts of assault, among other charges, but no trial date was set.
The Army has charged that Sergeant Bales, 39, who was serving his fourth combat tour, walked away from a remote outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in an ambush in two villages in the early morning hours of March 11. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children.
Prosecutors at a week of pretrial hearings in early November at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where Sergeant Bales was stationed, suggested that he had acted in deliberate fury, perhaps in revenge for a bomb attack that had caused a fellow soldier to lose a leg. Defense lawyers said evidence presented in the hearing about Sergeant Bales’s use of alcohol, steroids and sleeping aids complicated the picture of his mental state.
Source: The New York Times, December 20, 2012
