A troubling case
There is no way that you could describe me as a left-winger and – in general terms, partly due to my exposure to pals or acquaintances who have had military experience, and indeed families therefore – I am a respecter of all those who have served their country in uniform.
On principle I tend to be generally uneasy about, long after the event, civilian courts going back and examining the entrails of acts done upon active military service which (in my view) are almost always undertaken in circumstances to which normal rules of everyday peace-time life should not necessarily apply.
Having said that, the case currently in the news of Alexander Blackman – the Royal Marine who was court-martialled in 2103 for shooting dead a wounded Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in cold blood and about whom there is a concerted campaign in support of an appeal against his sentence – is a troubling one.
The latest development is that, following legal representations by various organs of the media, three Appeal Court judges have overturned a previous decision and decreed that the head-cam footage of the incident recorded at the time (or at least, some elements of it but not the actual shooting) can be publicly released.
See here for a report on the decision that appears today on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
Today I have two comments to make.
Firstly, I remember long ago – probably in the run-up to the original court martial – that this footage, and/or transcripts of it, were freely available in the media.
I certainly read reports and saw/heard the footage (albeit that, presumably as a result of taste and decency considerations news organisations declined to show the actual footage of the shooting that was available to them).
On the face of it, it looked/sounded pretty damning evidence to me at the time.
Presumably, in order to head off (in legal terms) the prospective prejudicial effect of said footage, at some point a court imposed a ban on it being exhibited publicly.
Since when – mostly – the media stage has been predominantly occupied by the public campaign in support of Mr Blackman’s appeal, including his new legal team outlining the additional evidence they have uncovered and/or wish to submit to the court martial appeal court (as well as the alleged poor conduct of the case by their predecessors).
My second comment is that I remain somewhat restrained in my support for Mr Blackman in any event.
As I understand it, one of the strongest arguments being made on his behalf is that – although he did not know it and it may not have been apparent at the time – he either was, or may have been, suffering from some kind of traumatic battle fatigue disorder syndrome (I use that phrase without being aware of whether it is accurate/appropriate) at the time of the incident which caused him to act as he did.
Now I haven’t seen the evidence that is going to be submitted to this effect and therefore any third party could justifiably argue that I haven’t a clue (or indeed the wherewithal upon to make any judgement at all) on the subject.
However, I can still recall the footage and sound referred to above from when it was first circulating far and wide around the globe via the internet. As I have already mentioned above, on the face of it, from my perspective it came across as pretty damning.
I’m connecting two legal cases here which in truth may not warrant being connected, but those of a certain vintage will no doubt remember Ernest Saunders of the celebrated ‘Guinness Four’ fraud conspiracy trial.
I’m not going to bore readers with the full intricacies of the case, but in summary – having been found guilty and sentenced to five years in gaol – Mr Saunders’s sentence was reduced to two and a half years on appeal when the Court of Appeal accepted expert evidence that he had been suffering from pre-senile dementia associated with incurable Alzheimer’s disease.
He was then released from Ford Open Prison in June 1991 after only ten months on account of said medical condition but then, shortly afterwards, infamously made a complete recovery from it.
It was later claimed that his symptoms were in fact due to stress and not pre-senile dementia but the suspicion has long remained in the public consciousness that Saunders and/or his defence team either discovered or ‘invented’ the pre-senile dementia as a convenient device by which to advance his appeal against sentence.
It’s akin to someone who commits some act of mindless violence or cruelty in their twenties suddenly remembering that some classmate or another broke their pencil in primary school and thereby not only completely ruined their life but directly caused their actions two decades later.
I do hope that Mr Blackman’s apparent battle fatigue trauma is not carved from the same stone.
