Suspect in killings will not participate in ‘sanity board’

Associated Press

SEATTLE

The U.S. soldier charged in the shooting deaths of 17 Afghan villagers last month will not participate in an Army review aimed at determining his mental state, his attorney said Friday.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was expected to face what’s called a “sanity board” examination by Army doctors from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, seeking to establish whether he’s competent to stand trial and what his mental state was at the time of the March 11 pre-dawn massacre in two southern Afghanistan villages.

But his civilian lawyer, John Henry Browne, said Friday he instructed Bales to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent because the Army will not allow Bales to have an attorney at the sanity-board review and will not allow the examination to be recorded. The Army also rejected his request to have a neuropsychologist on the board, Browne said.

“A member of the military does not give up constitutional rights by being in the military,” Browne wrote in an email to reporters. “Since the defense will have no way to know questions asked or answers given, Sgt. Bales’ civilian attorneys have instructed him to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and not participate in the sanity-board process, particularly since his Sixth Amendment right to counsel has been denied during the board process.”

Maj. Chris Ophardt, a spokesman at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle, said that typically, such examinations are not recorded, and defendants do not have their lawyers present. Such proceedings are medical, not legal, he said.

“They want to make sure the board can ask the questions they need to ask to make a fair determination, without any outside influence,” Ophardt said.

The sanity board had been expected to explore such issues as Bales’ deployment history, including a concussion that Browne has said he suffered during one of his three prior deployments to Iraq, as well as any prescription medication he may have been taking and whether some sort of psychotic episode led to the shooting.

In most cases, the only information given to prosecutors following a sanity-board review consists of a brief diagnosis and the answers to three yes-or-no questions: Was the defendant suffering from a mental disease at the time of the offense? Was the defendant able to appreciate the wrongness of his or her actions? Is the defendant currently suffering from a mental disease and thus unable to understand the legal proceedings?

The answers to those questions help prosecutors decide whether it’s fair to have the defendant stand trial, Ophardt said. If the answers are mixed, investigating officers can seek more information about the defendant’s mental state during a pretrial hearing or further psychiatric care for the defendant.

However, if a defendant raises a mental health- related defense, prosecutors can obtain more of the details of the sanity-board review, including any clinical interviews with the defendant.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the sanity board would proceed without Bales’ cooperation.

Bales, 38, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., is accused of walking off the base where he was deployed in southern Afghanistan with a 9 mm pistol and M-4 rifle outfitted with a grenade launcher. Officials say he walked to two local villages, where he killed four men, four women, two boys and seven girls, and then burned some of their bodies.