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Update, Wednesday afternoon: Major Nidal Malik Hasan has been sentenced to death.
On Friday, military courts in Washington State and Texas rendered decisions that, with a bit of bad luck, will create a nasty dilemma for President Obama.
At Lewis-McChord, an Army Air Force base near Tacoma, a six-member jury sentenced Staff Sergeant Robert Bales—who, on March 11, 2012, murdered sixteen civilian villagers in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan—to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
At Fort Hood, a jury of thirteen Army officers found Major Nidal Malik Hasan—who, on November 5, 2009, killed thirteen of his fellow-soldiers and wounded dozens more, none of them armed—guilty of forty-five counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.
There was never the slightest doubt, reasonable or unreasonable, about the culpability of either man. There was nothing “alleged” about their crimes. Because of the certainty of a guilty verdict, Sergeant Bales pleaded guilty. For exactly the same reason, Major Hasan did the opposite.
By pleading guilty, Bales foreclosed the possibility that he would be executed. The jury was left to choose between sentencing him to a standard life sentence, with the chance (though hardly the likelihood) of parole after twenty years, and the much harsher sentence that he has now received—under the legal circumstances, the harshest sentence the jury could impose. A truer name for that sentence would be “death in prison,” not “life in prison”: Bales is to be locked in a cage until he dies.
The Army, commendably, brought nine male relatives of Bales’s victims to Texas, to testify about his crimes and about their sufferings. Understandably—given the culture of rural Afghanistan, which blends together concepts of justice, vengeance, and eye-for-an-eye retribution—they were, as Jack Healy writes in the Times, not satisfied:>
On Monday, the Fort Hood jury will begin deliberations in the penalty phase of Major Hasan’s trial. Because Hasan did not plead guilty (he refused to plead at all, obliging the court to enter a not-guilty plea for him), he is eligible for the death penalty.
Hasan did not decline to plead guilty because he thought there was a chance that he would be found innocent. He declined to plead guilty because he did not want to foreclose the death penalty. He has made it unmistakably clear that he wants to be executed. He handled his own defense, or non-defense: he called no witnesses, presented no evidence, and delivered no closing argument. He has said that if he is killed by the United States government he will have earned the honor of dying a martyr to his faith.
And if the Texas military court does indeed sentence Hasan to death, it’s not hard to guess what conclusions will be drawn across much of the world, especially the Muslim world. Consider:
One member of the U.S. Army is an apple-pie American (white, Catholic, high-school football captain, Ohio State student, married father of two) with a slightly shady past (he was implicated in a financial-fraud case when he worked as a broker, before joining the Army, in 2001). He kills sixteen unarmed Afghani Muslim civilians, including four women and nine children. He gets life.
The other member of the U.S. Army is a Muslim, the eldest son of Palestinian immigrants, a medical doctor, an Army officer, unmarried. He kills thirteen uniformed American soldiers, unarmed. He gets death.
A third case hovers in the background. In 2003, in Kuwait, an Army sergeant used hand grenades and a rifle to kill two of his comrades and injure fourteen more. In 2005, a military court sentenced the sergeant to death. Last year—on July 13, 2012—the Army’s court of appeals affirmed the sentence. While appeals continue, the sergeant remains on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
This third member of the U.S. Army, Sergeant Hasan Karim Akbar, né Mark Fidel Kools, is also Muslim. He is an African-American whose parents changed his name when they converted to Islam. He kills two American soldiers. He gets death.
To sum up where we seem to be headed, as it is apt to be seen in many parts of the world: * One dark-skinned Muslim with an Arab name kills two American soldiers. He is put to death.
- A second dark-skinned Muslim with an Arab name kills thirteen American soldiers. He, too, is put to death. * A white Christian-American soldier kills sixteen Muslim civilians—three men, four women, nine children. His life is spared.
For an American soldier to be executed, the sentence of death has to be personally affirmed by the President of the United States.
Although Barack Obama was originally an opponent of capital punishment, by the time he ran for the Senate he was on record as supporting it in certain “heinous” cases. It’s logical to assume that he, like many other Democratic office-seekers in recent decades, took this position for reasons of political expediency, not out of conviction. Now his last campaign is behind him.
If the Texas military court sentences Major Hasan to death, and if the mandatory appeals process exhausts itself without undue delay (Hasan, unlike Sergeant Akbar, probably won’t put up much of a legal struggle), President Obama will be confronted with a difficult choice.
Since Pearl Harbor, the United States government has executed a hundred and forty-seven members of its armed forces. The last such execution—the hanging of a black soldier who, as a nineteen-year-old private, had raped and tried to kill an eleven-year-old Austrian girl—took place fifty-two years ago, in 1961. John F. Kennedy commuted a military death sentence early in his Presidency, and after that the practice fell into dormancy. In 1984, President Reagan issued an executive order reviving it. But, again, no military executions have actually happened since 1961.
It’s close to inconceivable that Obama would want his Administration to be remembered as the first in more than half a century to carry one out. If he declines to sign a death warrant in one of these cases, he will, of course, be subject to unrestrained demagogic attack from the Republican right. But if he does sign, and if the execution or executions are carried out, he will have essentially confirmed the suspicion that the United States places significantly less value on the lives of Muslims, regardless of nationality, than on the lives of Christians and other non-Muslims, also regardless of nationality. One can only hope that he will have the fortitude to reject that choice—a choice that, besides being morally abhorrent, would be grievously damaging to the national interest.
Above: Courtroom sketch of Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, from January 17, 2013. Peter Millett/Files/Reuters.
