War is hell, ask the boots on the ground.
A new wrinkle was added this week in the effort to free an Army first lieutenant convicted in the killing of Afghans – a pardon request to President Donald Trump.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine combat veteran, sent a letter to Trump asking him to personally review the case and pardon 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, who was sentenced to 19 years at Fort Leavenworth for unpremeditated murder after his platoon shot to death two Afghans while on patrol in 2012. Lorance is appealing the court-martial conviction, which also included attempted murder and making a false official statement.
“This is one of those cases that stands out as a stupid decision where someone who should not be in jail is going to jail,” Hunter said. “And not just that, a platoon commander who was on the ground and in his mind made a life-and-death decision in real time. Again, this is combat.”
Trump was asked about Lorance’s case during a Jan. 26 interview with conservative TV commentator Sean Hannity and said only that, “We’re looking at a few of them.” If the president agrees to Hunter’s request, he will be opening a murky and emotionally charged criminal case.
Fellow soldiers with the 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment gave damning testimony against Lorance during his trial – and were not prosecuted. A staff sergeant told the New York Times that the killings were “straight murder” directed by Lorance as platoon leader.
Hunter, who made the same pardon request to President Barack Obama, has joined with Lorance’s mother and advocates such as Hannity and fellow conservative commentator Allen West in calling for leniency. Online petitions and a Facebook page have rallied support.
“For the record, Clint never fired his weapon,” Hunter wrote to Trump in the Wednesday letter. “More importantly, previously withheld information now confirms forensic evidence linked DNA found on detonated roadside bombs to the DNA of the Afghan men.”
John Maher, Lorance’s defense attorney and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, said evidence linking the Afghan men to bomb-making networks and the battlefield deaths of soldiers could have exonerated the lieutenant.
But the evidence was not considered during the trial and only later discovered by defense attorneys during a search for the men in a biometric database used by the military in Afghanistan to identify enemies, Maher said. The evidence is now the crux of Lorance’s appeal.
“So we ran them and they all popped. Their fingerprints were on roadside bombs recovered at grid coordinators where U.S. paratroopers had been killed and injured,” he said. “The people who were killed may have been village elders but they were also bomb makers.”
HT: TAH