Military executions prove rare

Associated Press

DALLAS

Hundreds of unarmed soldiers, some about to deploy to Afghanistan, were waiting inside a building for vaccines and routine checkups when a fellow soldier walked in with two handguns and enough ammunition to commit one of the worst mass shootings in American history.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan doesn’t deny that he carried out the November 2009 attack at Fort Hood, Texas, which left 13 people dead and more than 30 others wounded. There are dozens of witnesses who saw it happen. Military law prohibits him from entering a guilty plea because authorities are seeking the death penalty. But if he is convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that starts Tuesday, there are likely years, if not decades, of appeals ahead.

He may never make it to the death chamber at all.

While the Hasan case is unusually complex, experts also say the military justice system is unaccustomed to dealing with death-penalty cases and has struggled to avoid overturned sentences.

Eleven of the 16 death sentences handed down by military juries in the last 30 years have been overturned, according to an academic study and court records. No active-duty soldier has been executed since 1961.

A reversed verdict or sentence on appeal in the Hasan case would be a fiasco for prosecutors and the Army. That’s one reason why prosecutors and the military judge have been deliberate leading up to trial, said Geoffrey Corn, a professor at the South Texas College of Law and former military lawyer.

“The public looks and says, ‘This is an obviously guilty defendant. What’s so hard about this?’” Corn said. “What seems so simple is, in fact, relatively complicated.”

Hasan is charged with 13 specifications of premeditated murder and 32 specifications of attempted premeditated murder. Thirteen officers from around the country who hold Hasan’s rank or higher will serve on the jury for a trial that likely will last one month and probably longer. They must be unanimous to convict Hasan of murder and sentence him to death. Three-quarters of the panel must vote for an attempted-murder conviction.