Sergeant Blackman: cleared of murder
A gunshot, some swearing and a few garbled instructions. If that was all that had been captured on his fellow marine’s body camera, Sergeant Alexander Blackman might have escaped a murder charge for killing a wounded Taliban insurgent in 2011, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. But the footage is altogether more damning. It shows Blackman – who was carrying out a battlefield assessment after an Apache helicopter had fired on two Taliban fighters – telling one of his men not to waste time tending to a badly wounded insurgent. After checking the Apache is out of sight, Blackman shoots the fighter in the chest. “There you are, shuffle off this mortal coil, you c***,” he says as the body convulses. “Obviously, this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas… I’ve just broken the Geneva Convention.” Blackman was convicted of murder in 2013 and sentenced to life imprisonment. But last week, his conviction was downgraded to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
The judges accepted that Blackman’s judgement had been impaired by acute combat stress, said Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times, and you can see why. At the time of the incident, the marine was in command of a remote army outpost in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. He and his unit were living under “relentless siege”, carrying out perilous twice-daily patrols in 50°C heat. Blackman, who’d lost his father just before deployment, had seen a colleague’s leg hung as a trophy from a tree after a roadside bomb, and had had to clean up after another marine suffered fatal head injuries in a grenade attack. There was a perceived lack of support from commanders: the base was considered too dangerous for visits by the unit’s padre, and Lieutenant Colonel Ewen Murchison, their commander, dropped in only once or twice during their six-month tour.
There was clearly an element of institutional failure here, said The Times. Colonel Oliver Lee – who took over from Murchison and subsequently resigned in protest at the treatment of Blackman – had become alarmed by the “signs of plummeting morale and brutalisation” in Blackman’s unit while preparing to take up his post. Yet he says he was prevented from giving evidence to the court martial. The top brass also “suppressed a report on mitigating factors”, said the Daily Mail. They wanted to present Blackman as a rotten apple in order to avoid questions about their own culpability, and to bring a swift close to the embarrassing affair. Last week’s court ruling righted a great wrong.