Let’s be clear. Trump’s decision to pardon the four Blackwater guards is by far the most outrageous of the raft of pardons he has issued so far. There is literally no defensible reason to pardon the four men who indiscriminately shot into a crowd of civilians, killing 14 people and wounding 20 others—many of whom were trying to flee.
While the pardons of the likes of Chris Collins, Duncan L. Hunter, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and others are merely acts of corruption, pardoning these four killers can only be described as pure evil. This is a matter of who we are as a nation. We have effectively told the world that you can murder innocent people and get away with it. What happened in 2007 was not the act of a civilized nation. But we must remember that this isn’t the first time that we failed to do right by the victims in Nisour Square.
If you’ll remember, the four guards were slated to go to trial in early 2010 for their crimes. However, in the waning hours of 2009, federal judge Ricardo Urbina tossed out the charges after learning that prosecutors had based their case heavily on statements they gave to State Department investigators in the aftermath of the shooting. Those were statements that they were required to give if they wanted to keep their jobs.
By using those statements to guide their investigation, Urbina found, prosecutors violated the guards’ Fifth Amendment rights. Indeed, the guards were promised that those statements would not be used against them at trial. Despite repeated warnings by Justice Department lawyers, the trial team pressed ahead with ferreting out the statements.
According to Urbina’s written opinion, it looks like Eric Holder and his Justice Department already knew that these tactics imperiled the case against one of the guards, Nicholas Slatten. The government concluded that Slatten’s indictment was tainted by grand jury witnesses being exposed to those “compelled statements,” and had sought to dismiss the charges against Slatten without prejudice. However, Urbina apparently concluded that the indictments against the other four guards—Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Paul Slough, and Evan Liberty—was equally tainted by the use of those statements. Urbina then scolded the prosecutors for attempting to convince him that they didn’t try to use these statements in the face of evidence that they indeed used them, saying that their explanations were “unbelievable and lacking in crediblity”—language you NEVER want to hear from a judge.
There was no doubt that what happened at Nissour Square was a criminal act. But Urbina really had no choice but to throw out the charges. After all, those who are accused of crime have rights—even when they are manifestly guilty. Teacherken, who is as well versed on these matters as any Kossack who isn’t a lawyer, explained why in a 2010 diary.
It was the obligation of the prosecutors to independently develop evidence of wrongdoing. Otherwise inadmissible evidence can be used usually only if the prosecution can demonstrate inevitable discovery. No attempt to establish that was offered here.
I am not a lawyer. I merely teach government and politics to high school students. Yet as unversed as I might be in the niceties of law, I know this decision was correct.
If we ever waiver in our support of basic civil liberties, we abandon the Constitution itself. If an administration can pick and choose when it will abide by the limits placed upon its actions, the criminal justice system becomes an arm of political repression.
I’d go further. “No one is above the law” also means “no one is below the law.” While there is no doubt that these four guards are murderers and thugs, the prosecutors engaged in tactics that can’t be tolerated in a criminal trial—even if a defendant is manifestly guilty.
Indeed, the latter history of this case only proves how egregious the initial prosecutors’ behavior was. The charges were reinstated in 2011. Charges against Ball were dropped in 2013, and the other four were tried and convicted in 2014. Slatten was sentenced to life in prison, while the other three were sentenced to 30 years each. In 2017, Slatten’s sentence was thrown out by the DC Court of Appeals due to concerns his trial should have been severed. The same court ordered the other three resentenced because the 30-year sentences were considered cruel and unusual punishment. Slatten was retried and convicted in 2018, and his life sentence reinstated the following year. The other three were sentenced to terms ranging from 12 to 15 years.
In other words, all of this proved that even without the compelled statements, there was enough evidence to put these three thugs in prison for a long time. It makes the Bush-era trial team’s actions even more outrageous. There was really no need to resort to such tactics in order to put them away. And it makes Trump’s pardons all the more outrageous.
It cannot be stated enough—we had a second chance to do right by those innocent people. And we failed them—again.