Word: martialled
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...last month, when Federal District Court Judge J. Robert Elliott reversed the conviction of William Galley and ordered him released from confinement in the My Lai case. Elliott's foremost argument was that "massive adverse pretrial publicity" had prevented the six-officer panel at Galley's court-martial in 1971 from considering the case without prejudice and that, therefore, he had not been fairly tried...
...destabilize" the Allende government. According to a recent Amnesty International report, these same officers now maintain concentration camps for some 6000 to 10,000 political prisoners where electrical torture and beatings are commonplace. These political prisoners are denied the most basic human rights while being subjected to summary court martial and possible execution at the discretion of the Chilean military regime...
Even before the court-martial was convened at Fort Benning in 1971, fairness loomed as the major problem. The My Lai massacre had been the most widely publicized military atrocity in U.S. history. Lieut. William Calley was the only defendant convicted, though 25 of his superiors and subordinates had been implicated in varying degrees. Had it been fair to single him out? With all the publicity, could he possibly have had a fair trial? Could he have had equitable treatment from a military system eager to purify itself...
...there has ever been a case in which a conviction should be set aside because of prejudicial publicity, this is it." With press references to Calley as "everything from a mass murderer to a ghoul," it seemed as if "all that would be necessary would be for the court-martial to convene and for the judge to announce, 'Bring the guilty rascal in and we will give him a fair trial.' " Then, hyping up his own hyperbole, the judge launched into the opinion's alliterative climax: "He was pummeled and pilloried by the press. He was taunted...
...legal experts were initially skeptical of much of Elliott's reasoning, and agreed with a Justice Department official's assessment that "the opinion appears vulnerable on most of its points." Elliott's conclusions about publicity were the most controversial. For one thing, members of the court-martial panel were not likely to read or hear anything substantive outside the courtroom that was not presented in exceptionally grim detail by prosecution witnesses...