The murder trial of a former Blackwater security contractor charged in the 2007 mass shooting of unarmed civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle is back in the hands of a U.S. jury.
Nicholas A. Slatten, 34, was convicted of first-degree murder by a federal jury in Washington in October 2014 when he stood trial with three fellow Blackwater guards in an incident that fomented deep resentment about the accountability of American security forces during the Iraq War.
But a U.S. appeals court last August ordered a new trial for Slatten, saying he should have been tried separately from a co-defendant who had said that he, not Slatten, fired the first rounds that led members of a Blackwater convoy to fire wildly with automatic rifles and grenade launchers in Baghdad’s congested Nisour Square, killing or injuring 31 civilians.
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Jurors in the retrial were set to continue deliberations Tuesday.
In the closing arguments of the five-week retrial, U.S. prosecutors argued Slatten acted out of deep hatred of all Iraqis, not only insurgents, and deliberately instigated the Sept. 16, 2007, massacre in a botched security operation. Prosecutors told the jury Slatten acted on a “misguided notion of retribution” for the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez said Slatten used his sniper rifle to fatally shoot the 19-year-old driver of a white Kia stopped near the front of traffic halted by Blackwater’s Raven 23 convoy, setting off the onslaught that killed women clutching only purses and children holding their hands up, Justice Department investigators later found.
Prosecutors said Slatten and others initially celebrated the one-sided firefight with “backslapping” and high-fives, with one Blackwater member testifying Slatten bragged afterward that he had “popped his grape,” an apparent reference to the Kia driver, Ahmed Haitham Ahmed Al Rubia’y, a medical student driving with his mother.
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Other guards disagreed with what they called unprovoked killings, witnesses testified. Prosecutors said no evidence of insurgents was ever found.
“There is either one shot or two shots,” followed by a woman’s screams, Campoamor-Sanchez told jurors. “That’s what breaks the silence. That’s what begins this whole horrible chapter, that single or two shots” by Slatten.
Slatten’s attorneys argued their client acted in self-defense in a war zone, firing after others reported incoming AK-47 gunfire and mistaking the Kia for a car bomb.
In Slatten’s first trial, his defense argued to jurors and cited other evidence that another guard, not Slatten, fired first after the Kia moved toward the convoy. But his defense was not allowed to introduce statements to investigators made in the days after the shooting by the other guard-- Paul A. Slough, 38, of Keller, Tex--, because he also was on trial and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
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In the 2014 trial, Slough and two other guards were found guilty of 13 counts of manslaughter and 17 counts of attempted manslaughter. The appeals court that ordered a new trial for Slatten also said the three others — who had received 30-year prison terms — should be resentenced.
Slatten’s attorneys at his retrial said Slough’s statements were corroborated by two Iraqi police traffic officers nearby, who said the first shots came from the top-mounted turret gun of Slatten’s armored vehicle, manned by Slough. Slatten was positioned inside a few feet lower, firing unseen through a side porthole.
“What is his [Slough’s] incentive to make up that he shot the driver?” defense lawyer Dane Butswinkas asked the jury this summer. “How can that not be reasonable doubt?”
Slatten’s defense also got a new boost when a key government witness — Jimmy Watson, the leader of the four-vehicle convoy who was seated next to Slatten — retreated on the witness stand from strong, repeated testimony that he had heard Slatten fire first.
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Jurors began deliberating Tuesday in the case before U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth.
The shooting at the traffic circle sparked anti-American outrage abroad and made the name Blackwater synonymous with unaccountable U.S. military power.
Slatten’s retrial reflects the latest twist in prosecutors’ dogged but ill-starred prosecution, a pursuit marred by the government’s own missteps.
Charges were first brought against six Blackwater employees in 2008, one of whom, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and testified against Slatten in both trials, although he also said he believed Slough fired first.
A federal judge threw out the other indictments in 2009, saying prosecutors improperly relied on statements the guards gave State Department investigators immediately after the shooting, believing that their statements would not be used in court.
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A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed that ruling in 2011, clearing the way for prosecutors to obtain fresh indictments against Slatten and the three others.
However, prosecutors took so long to charge Slatten that the statutory time limit for bringing a manslaughter charge had expired, a court found. The Justice Department responded by charging Slatten, a former Army sniper, with first-degree murder, which has no statute of limitations.
This summer, prosecutors have mostly rerun a streamlined version of Slatten’s first murder trial — cutting an 11-week trial to five weeks and relying on 37 witnesses instead of 70.
But those witnesses again included Iraqi survivors who traveled to Washington and wrenchingly described out-of-control firing by Blackwater guards in graphic terms. Other witnesses included former colleagues who recounted Slatten’s description of Iraqis as “animals” whose “lives are not worth anything” and past incidents in which he fired unprovoked on innocuous targets to draw out gunfire.
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Prosecutors said Slough’s assertion that he was the first to shoot, believing the convoy was under attack, was demonstrably false, part of a series of lies to avoid accountability for a civilian massacre.
They said his claim the Kia had approached at high speed was contradicted by nine eyewitnesses, six of whom said it rolled forward only after its driver had been shot.
Assistant U.S. Attorney T. Patrick Martin said Slough was forced to falsify the threat the driver posed to try to explain his own actions — as the turret gunner, they said, he knew he was the only shooter visible to witnesses outside the vehicle — and thus cover up the culpability of others in his group.
“Blame Mr. Slough. ... But that’s not justice,” Martin told jurors in the retrial, asking them to find Slatten “guilty as charged and hold him accountable for taking Ahmed’s life that day.”
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Slatten, of Sparta, Tenn., had been imprisoned in Sumterville, Fla., serving a mandatory life sentence since his October 2014 conviction, before being moved to Virginia and the District for retrial.
Slough, along with Evan S. Liberty, 36, of Rochester, N.H., and Dustin L. Heard, 37, of Maryville, Tenn., are awaiting their resentencings after the appeals court said their 30-year terms violated the constitutional prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The three men faced a minimum of 30 years — twice the maximum punishment for manslaughter alone — after being convicted of using military firearms while committing a felony, an enhanced penalty that was primarily aimed at gang members and had never been used against security contractors given military weapons by the U.S. government.
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