A U.S. soldier accused of killing five fellow servicemen at a military combat stress center in Baghdad in 2009 entered no plea at an arraignment on Monday at a military base in Washington state.
Sergeant John Russell,
48, is accused of going on a shooting spree at Camp Liberty, near the
Baghdad airport, in an assault the military said at the time could have
been triggered by combat stress.
Russell, of the 54th Engineer Battalion based in
Bamberg, Germany, faces five charges of premeditated murder, one charge
of aggravated assault and one charge of attempted murder in connection
with the May 2009 shootings. Six months ago, he was ordered to stand
trial in a military court that has the power to sentence him to death,
if he is convicted.
Two of the five people killed in the shooting were
medical staff officers at the counseling center for troops experiencing
combat stress. The others were soldiers.
Russell, tall and broad-shouldered with a military
crew-cut and glasses, was mostly silent during the 15-minute hearing,
answering only "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to the judge's questions.
Russell's attorney, James Culp,
waived hearing of the charges on Russell's behalf and entered no plea
for him, which is common practice in military justice procedure. No date
has been set for the court-martial, but both military prosecutors and
defense attorneys indicated on Monday that it could begin in March.
SENSITIVE TIME
The arraignment, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, comes at a sensitive time for the Army, which is in the process of deciding how to prosecute Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, a soldier accused of killing Afghan villagers in cold blood earlier this year.
A two-week hearing at Lewis-McChord to establish if
there is sufficient evidence to send Bales to a court-martial wrapped up
last week after harrowing testimony from Afghan adults and children
wounded in the attack.
Bales' civilian defense lawyers have suggested he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
On Monday, Russell's attorney outlined a defense based on his declining mental state.
Russell suffered from depression, thoughts of suicide, anxiety and stress
from multiple deployments, and suffered "at least one traumatic
experience involving civilian casualties" and "mass grave sites" while
serving in Bosnia and Kosovo during 1998 and 1999, Culp said in
presenting arguments to the judge after the arraignment.
Culp and military defense lawyers, through telephone
testimony presented by forensic psychiatric experts, told the judge they
planned to use a Magnetic Resonance Imaging test to prove that Russell
had brain damage.
Another defense witness testified that forensic
hypnosis would be needed to unlock Russell's memories of the shootings
on May 11, 2009.
Government witness Dr. Ronald Schouten, a forensic
psychiatrist at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, argued against
the effectiveness of either.
"If we're doing brain imaging now, it doesn't tell us
what it was three years ago," Schouten said. Later, he added: "Hypnosis
has long been recognized as invalid and prone to providing inaccurate
information."
Dr. Robert Sadoff of the University of Pennsylvania,
one of the country's top experts in forensic psychiatry, is scheduled to
testify as a defense witness on Tuesday.
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