Fort Hood trial resumes as lawyers demand removal
The soldier on trial for the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood was allowed Thursday to continue representing himself after the judge barred his standby attorneys from taking over, despite their claims that the Army psychiatrist was trying to secure his own death sentence.
The military lawyers ordered to help Maj. Nidal Hasan had asked to either be removed from the case or be allowed to take over his defense. They said they believed Hasan was trying to secure his own death sentence for the attack that killed 13 people inside a processing center at the sprawling Texas military base.
The judge, Col. Tara Osborn, denied that request Thursday in a heated exchange with the lead standby attorney, saying it was clear the lawyers simply disagreed with Hasan’s defense strategy. Hasan has been largely silent during the trial, and he objected only once Thursday as nearly a dozen witnesses testified.
But the attorneys were adamant and said they would appeal Osborn’s ruling to a higher court.
“We believe your order is causing us to violate our rules of professional conduct,” Lt. Col. Kris Poppe told the judge. Osborn fired back that she had already heard and ruled on such arguments.
The exchange prompted Osborn to briefly recess the trial. She later ordered the attorneys to resume their advisory roles and allowed witnesses to begin testifying, including the only one Hasan briefly challenged.
Sgt. 1st Class Maria Guerra told jurors that amid the chaos of the shootings she had to quickly decide who she could save, so she grabbed a black marker and wrote a “D” on the foreheads of those she couldn’t. To people lingering over the dead, she shouted: “You need to move on!”
When prosecutors asked Guerra to describe the scene, her voice began breaking.
“I see bodies. I see bodies everywhere. And I see blood,” she said. “No one is moving. There was no movement. There was no sound. So I yelled out, ‘Is everybody OK? … I started hearing, ‘Help me. I’m bleeding. I’ve been shot. Help me.’”
Hasan objected when Guerra described hearing the gunman silence a woman who was crying out, “My baby! My baby!” Hasan interrupted to ask the judge, “Would you remind Sgt. 1st Class Guerra that she’s under oath?”
Osborn did so, briskly. Then a prosecutor asked Guerra if there was anything she wanted to change about her testimony. She replied: “No, sir.”
The tension between Hasan and his standby attorneys initially spilled over Wednesday — on only the second day of the trial. Poppe told the judge that if Hasan were allowed to continue on his own, he and Hasan’s other standby attorneys wanted their roles minimized so Hasan couldn’t ask them for help with a strategy they opposed.
The prosecutor, Col. Michael Mulligan, defended Hasan’s strategy, saying it would have been “absurd” for Hasan to contest the facts of what happened the day of the attack. Mulligan said Hasan appeared to be taking on a “tried and true” defense strategy of not contesting the facts but rather offering an alternative reason about why they occurred.
“I’m really perplexed as to how it’s caused such a moral dilemma,” Mulligan told the judge Thursday morning.
When jurors were allowed into the courtroom later in the day, they heard from soldiers who were shot during the attack. Other witnesses described a bloody scene inside the Army post’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where the shootings occurred as soldiers were preparing to deploy.
Staff Sgt. Michael Davis testified that he took cover under a desk when he realized the rapid gunfire wasn’t from a training exercise. He saw blood spray, then someone else get shot. When he thought it safe to flee, he stood up but was quickly shot in the back.
