Judge Assails Military in Rejecting Count Against Ex-Marine
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Version 0 of 1. A federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday dismissed the most serious charge against a man accused of the accidental shooting of a fellow serviceman while they were on active duty in Iraq in 2008, ruling that it would be unfair to charge him in civilian court after officials failed for years to charge him in a military court. In a scathing assessment of the conduct of military officials and lawyers, the judge, Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court, wrote that the disappearance of a crucial witness, an Iraqi translator known as Hollywood, made it impossible for the accused man, Wilfredo Santiago, who had been a Marine corporal, to receive a fair trial. Judge McMahon reserved her harshest criticism for how the case was handled by the military and accused the Marines of failing to live up to their own creed: Semper Fidelis, or always faithful. Specifically, she said, the Marines had failed Michael Carpeso, a Navy corpsman when he lost the use of his left eye as a result of the shooting. “Justice is an imperfect remedy,” she wrote. “It cannot give a man back his eye. But it can give him a sense that he matters — matters in this world and matters before the law.” Mr. Santiago’s rights must be respected, she wrote, but that should not excuse what happened in Iraq. “Something happened on that day, in that place, that irrevocably altered the life of an innocent man,” Judge McMahon wrote. “That matter should have been put before a jury if only so that Carpeso could have the catharsis of justice.” The basic facts of the case were clear soon after the night of the shooting at a combat outpost in Diwaniya Province. On Jan. 26, 2008, Corporal Santiago, Corpsman Carpeso and Hollywood were together in a billeting container when the corpsman was shot in the eye. Corpsman Carpeso could not recall what happened. Corporal Santiago initially told military investigators that he had not shot the corpsman, but later changed his story and said his weapon had discharged accidentally. Hollywood was interviewed by military investigators, and said he could not definitively say how Corpsman Carpeso had come to be shot. In her 56-page opinion, Judge McMahon provides a detailed account of a bureaucratic mess that resulted in delays, confusion, no court-martial, charges brought last January by the United States attorney in Manhattan and the issues now before her in a civilian court nearly six years after the shooting. “It is not a tale that inspires confidence in our criminal justice system,” she wrote. Part of the problem, she wrote, was that no military unit took “ownership” for Corporal Santiago. “As a result, no one prioritized his case,” she wrote. In its own investigation into the “lack of communication” regarding the case, the military issued a report that Judge McMahon called “the sorriest lot of ‘C.Y.A.’ interviews I have ever read.” “Everybody blamed everybody else, or said it was ‘not my job’ to insure that the Santiago/Carpeso matter was brought to a satisfactory conclusion,” she wrote. The judge, however, allowed a lesser charge, giving false statements to officials, to proceed against Mr. Santiago. A spokesman for the Marines said he would have no comment. Among her criticisms, Judge McMahon accused Marine lawyers of incompetence, citing an instance when they claimed they had taken months researching whether Mr. Santiago could be recalled to active duty and prosecuted. “This is symptomatic of something that happened repeatedly in this case: Marine lawyers taking months to make the most modest progress on tasks that any halfway competent second-year law student could complete in a matter of hours,” she wrote. Judge McMahon said it was unclear how the decision had been made to charge Mr. Santiago, a Bronx resident, in civilian court, but that presented its own problems. Under the military code, he could have been charged with handling his weapon in a reckless manner. There is no equivalent charge in civilian court, so a case would have to be made for assault. The testimony of the translator would have been critical to both the defense and the prosecution. Judge McMahon, noting the dangers faced by Iraqis who worked with American forces, said Hollywood’s association with the military ended in 2010 and she called his disappearance “ominous.” After combing through mountains of reports and documents prepared by the Marines, she wrote that she became familiar with the motto “Semper Fidelis,” which is often included at the end of correspondence. “After a while it started to annoy me to see those proud words at the end of all those emails,” she wrote, “because in those emails, and in their actions, the Marines displayed precious little eternal fidelity toward Michael John Carpeso.” |