The jury of six military personnel is tasked with deciding if he will spend the rest of his life in prison or if he will be eligible for parole after 20 years.
Source/Credit: Reuters
By Jonathan Kaminsky | August 22, 2013
TACOMA, Washington, Aug 22 (Reuters) - A decorated U.S. soldier who gunned down 16 unarmed Afghan civilians in a nighttime rampage apologized on Thursday at a sentencing hearing to determine his fate, calling the killings "an act of cowardice."
Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, a veteran of four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has admitted to shooting the villagers, mostly women and children, in attacks on their compounds in Kandahar province in March 2012.
"Sorry just isn't good enough, but I am sorry," Bales told a jury in a military courtroom in Washington state. "What I did is an act of cowardice."
Bales pleaded guilty to the killings in June in a deal that will spare him the death penalty. The jury of six military personnel is tasked with deciding if he will spend the rest of his life in prison or if he will be eligible for parole after 20 years.
Defense lawyers have been seeking to show that Bales suffered a breakdown under the pressure of his final deployment to Afghanistan, and say he suffered from post traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury even before his last deployment to Afghanistan.
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