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Marine Charged In US Civilian Court With Fallujah Actions
Riverside, California The defense team representing Marine infantryman Jose Luis Nazario asked a federal court judge Monday to dismiss voluntary manslaughter charges against their client for allegedly killing two Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq more than three years ago. At the time Nazario was a squad leader engaged in desperate house-to-house combat. The decorated Marine veteran was assigned to 3rd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines when the incident allegedly occurred. A year later four enlisted members of the same platoon would be charged with murder and other war crimes in the unrelated "Haditha Massacre" incident... ...There are no bodies, no names, no grieving relatives, no civilian witnesses, no crime scene, and no physical evidence... ... Nazario, now a civilian without any military obligation, was charged under the Military Extraterritorial Extradition Act (MEJA), a law passed by Congress in 2000 to give government prosecutors a mechanism for charging civilians and former service members for alleged criminal acts they committed while serving overseas. Before MEJA, members of the armed forces were prosecuted under military law or not at all, and in many instances civilians who committed crimes in foreign lands were completely beyond the reach of American civilian jurisdiction. MEJA applies to two categories of people, those employed by or accompanying the armed forces outside the U.S. and those to whom the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) military law applied at the time of the offense. Nazario is in that category of alleged offenders. Assistant US Attorneys Jerry A. Behnke and Charles J. Kovats represented the government in Nazarios motion hearing. They argued that MEJA is specifically tailored to prosecute former service members who allegedly committed crimes while serving in combat... Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-04-22 |
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