Blackwater guards trial postponed until 2010

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Judge Ricardo Urbina, assigned to work on the case against five Blackwater security guards involved in al-Nissor Square shooting, decided to set a trial date for February 1, 2010. “Judge Ricardo Urbina set a trial date for February 1, 2010. He agreed with defense attorneys that preparations for the complex case will require a full year, including the likely need for lawyers to travel to Baghdad to gather information and conduct interviews,” CNN reported on Wednesday. The five defendants are Donald Ball, 26, of West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard, 27, of Knoxville, Tennessee; Evan Liberty, 26, of Rochester, New Hampshire; Nick Slatten, 25, of Sparta, Tennessee; and Paul Slough, 29, of Keller, Texas. A sixth former security guard, Jeremy P. Ridgeway, 35, of California, has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and attempted manslaughter. Each of the former guards has been charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter and one count of using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime. “The five defendants, seated in a row at a courtroom table, remained silent in court, and as they entered and departed the courthouse. A lawyer entered their plea on their behalf,” the CNN said, Attorney David Schertler, speaking for all the defendants outside the courthouse, predicted they will be proved innocent. “We want to make it clear to everyone these men committed no crime. They were defending themselves on a battlefield in a war zone when this occurred,” he said. If convicted, the defendants would face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each manslaughter count, seven years in prison for each count of attempted manslaughter, and a 30-year mandatory minimum sentence for the firearms charge. In September 2007, Blackwater security guards were involved in a shooting in downtown Baghdad in which at least 17 Iraqis were killed. After the shooting, the Iraqi government demanded that Blackwater be expelled from the country and that its guards be held accountable. Despite the protests, the State Department has continued to use Blackwater in Baghdad, although the Justice Department has been conducting a criminal investigation of the shooting. The fact that Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq contributed to the Iraqi government’s hard-line stance on the legal immunity issue in the negotiations. Whether the Iraqi government will now begin its own criminal investigation of the Blackwater shooting is unclear, administration officials and contracting industry executives said. SH (I) 1