Gunman guilty
Jury convicts psychiatrist in 2009 shootings
FORT HOOD, TEXAS — A military jury on Friday convicted Maj. Nidal Hasan, who shouted “Allahu akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great!” — before drawing a laser-sighted pistol and opening fire inside a medical building in the deadly 2009 shooting rampage at a U.S. army base that killed 13 people and wounded 32.
Hasan, an army psychiatrist who planned the attack for weeks and said he acted to protect Muslim insurgents abroad from American aggression, is eligible for the death penalty because of the jury’s unanimous verdict. Sentencing begins Monday.
There was never any doubt that Hasan was the gunman. He acknowledged that he was the one who pulled the trigger on fellow soldiers — including a pregnant private who curled on the floor and pleaded for her baby’s life — as they prepared to deploy overseas to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hasan did not react to the verdict, looking straight at jurors as they announced their findings. After the hearing, relatives of the dead and wounded fought back tears. Some smiled and warmly patted each other’s shoulders as they left court.
Because Hasan never denied his actions, the court-martial was always less about a conviction than it was about ensuring he received a death sentence.
Autumn Manning, whose husband, retired Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning, was shot six times during the attack, wept when the verdict was read. She said she had been concerned that some charges might be reduced to manslaughter, which would have taken a death sentence off the table.
“This is so emotional,” she said in a telephone interview from Lacey, Wash., where she and her husband live. “I’ve just been crying since we heard it because it was a relief.”
John Galligan, Hasan’s former lead attorney, said Hasan called him to make sure he heard the verdict. He said Hasan did not indicate whether he would retain an attorney or continue to represent himself during the trial’s sentencing phase.
Galligan said the jury did not hear all the facts because the judge refused to allow evidence that helped explain Hasan’s actions.
“The jury we heard from only got half the facts,” Galligan said.
The jury of 13 high-ranking officers took about seven hours to reach the verdict. In the next phase, jurors must all agree to give Hasan the death penalty before he can be sent to the military’s death row, which has just five other prisoners. If they do not agree, the 42-year-old could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Hasan, a Virginia-born Muslim, bristled when the trial judge, Col. Tara Osborn, suggested the shooting rampage could have been avoided were it not for a spontaneous flash of anger.
“It wasn’t done under the heat of sudden passion,” Hasan said before jurors began deliberating. “There was adequate provocation — that these were deploying soldiers that were going to engage in an illegal war.”
All but one of the dead were soldiers.
The attack ended when Hasan was shot in the back by one of the officers responding to the shooting. He is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair.
Hasan, who acted as his own attorney, began the trial by telling jurors he was the gunman. But he said little else over the next three weeks, which convinced his court-appointed standby lawyers that Hasan’s only goal was to get a death sentence.
As the trial progressed, those suspicions grew. The military called nearly 90 witnesses, but Hasan rested his case without calling a single person to testify in his defence and made no closing argument. Yet he leaked documents during the trial to journalists that revealed him telling military mental health workers that he could “still be a martyr” if executed.
Death sentences are rare in the military and trigger automatic appeals. Among the final barriers to execution is authorization from the president. No American soldier has been executed since 1961.