Word: greenes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...March 12, 2006, Private First Class Green and three fellow soldiers got drunk on Iraqi whiskey at a lightly defended checkpoint in one of the country's most dangerous regions. Harboring a hatred of the locals that stemmed from heavy losses their platoon had sustained, Green and his co-conspirators hit upon a plan as savage as it was outrageous. Donning long black underwear disguises they called "ninja suits," they slipped away unnoticed from their post and ventured to a house several hundred meters away, where they jumped the family living there. Three of the four soldiers, including Green, raped...
After a lower-enlisted Army whistle-blower who had learned indirectly about U.S. involvement in the crime came forward, Green's three co-conspirators were convicted in military courts, all receiving sentences of 90 years or longer. But because Green had already been discharged (for reasons unrelated to the crime), he was tried in civilian court. It was the first time a former soldier had faced trial - and the possible death penalty - in such a jurisdiction for his actions in a war zone. On May 7, he was found guilty of 16 counts of murder, rape and related charges...
...week and a half, lawyers presented evidence, testimony and arguments to the same jury that convicted Green about whether his crimes warranted death or life in prison without parole. In closing arguments, federal prosecutor Brian Skaret focused on the barbarity of the acts. Displaying gory crime-scene photos of the slaughtered family, Skaret emphasized that Green alone bore responsibility for shooting the two adults and two children and said that Green must pay for that choice with his life. The defense repeatedly asserted that the Army must shoulder some blame because it did not heed warning signs about Green...
...There is no excuse for what Steven Green did," defense attorney Scott Wendelsdorf conceded during his closing, "but there is an explanation," which, he argued, made Green's living the rest of his life in jail without possibility of parole a more just punishment. Summarizing the horrific conditions Green's unit lived and fought under, the breakdowns in leadership it experienced and the fact that Green's superiors knew he was obsessed with killing Iraqi civilians yet kept him on the front lines, Wendelsdorf said, "The United States of America failed Steven Green. And that would not amount...
...Frederick, a former editor at TIME, is writing a book about Green's unit, Black Hearts: One Platoon's Disintegration in the Triangle of Death and the American Ordeal in Iraq, which is to be published in spring 2010 by Harmony Books...