Word: hutto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With those stark words, Sergeant Charles Hutto told an Army investigator what he had done at My Lai. He followed orders, Hutto said; the orders, by all accounts, had been to kill every living thing in the small village. The defense at Hutto's court-martial last week never refuted the statement. The prosecution was unable to buttress it with eyewitness testimony. But the precise facts concerning Hutto's actions seemed almost academic. Rather the issue became one of perception and intelligence at the bottom of the chain of command...
...Hutto's civilian defense attorney, Edward Magill, argued that his client had "thought that the Army would only give him legal orders," hence he was not guilty of assault with intent to kill. Colonel Kenneth Howard, the trial judge, set one milepost in the My Lai saga by declaring that a superior's directive to kill unarmed civilians was "illegal."* But, Howard said in his charge to the jury of six officers, the question really came down to the accused's ability to decide for himself whether the order was illegal. In two hours, the six combat...
...matter of orders has become the central theme in the defense of those charged in the March 1968 massacre. In Hutto's court-martial and in the separate trial of Lieut. William Calley, the emphasis was on passing the buck upward toward the commanders who directed the assault on My Lai. The names of superiors, among them Company Commander Ernest Medina, Task Force Commander Frank Barker (who was killed three months after My Lai) and Brigade Commander Oran K. Henderson, were mentioned on the witness stand...
...Cont'd) The U.S. Army last week filed charges against two more members of an America! Division company that attacked the South Vietnamese village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. Sergeant Charles E. Hutto, 21, of Tallulah, La., was charged with premeditated murder, rape and assault with intent to commit murder. Private Gerald A. Smith, 22, of Chicago, was accused of premeditated murder and indecent assault on a Vietnamese female. The action is preliminary to the possible convening of a court-martial for Hutto, now stationed at Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Wash., and for Smith, assigned to Fort...