But
this is not who we are? Come on"really?
Secretary
Panetta might have summed it up inadvertently last week when he admitted that " these
things happen, and they'll probably happen again." And again, and again, and again. Do Americans even care anymore, or have we
become so inured to hostility that atrocities have become interchangeable with
normalcy, a metaplasia as insidious as the slow boil of the 10,000 day war in
Vietnam? And we all know how well that
went.
While all this started to sink in,
as well as the fact that our country's new signature wartime mass-killing had
taken place the week of the My Lai massacre's 44th
anniversary, it was announced that Bales will be represented by Seattle's brash,
flamboyant defense counsel John
Henry Browne , a hired gun for the indefensible.
A case like Bale's is right in Browne's
wheelhouse, having gained his share of notoriety over time representing serial
killers and mass murderers like Ted Bundy and Seattle's Benjamin Ng , and
still reviled for defending serial arsonist Martin Pang, who confessed to
setting fire to his parent's cold storage warehouse, killing four firefighters
in 1995. After forty years of fabricating reasonable doubt, John Henry is still
a magnet for the infamous.
A chance encounter with Browne for the Defense occurred over
twenty years ago when I was selected to serve on a jury at King County Superior
Court. The trial seemed like a formality
to incarceration - a gang shooting, no good guys, five counts of attempted
murder, multiple eye witnesses, and motive -- and as the reluctant jury
foreperson, a quick verdict seemed likely.
Then, straight out of central
casting, came Browne for the Defense,
all ego, six feet six, and dressed to the nines. Combative, charming, and arrogant, from voir
dire to deliberation he owned the jury, seducing it into a mistrial. While the defense counsel and I actually ended
up on opposite sides of the defendant's not guilty plea, I admired his work. Browne found and converted the convincible,
picking off the weak in our herd of jurors, in spite of the evidence, and his
client eventually walked.
By contrast and charges of homicide
notwithstanding, SGT Robert Bales will never leave Fort Leavenworth unshackled
and he will consider himself lucky to have called The Law Offices of John Henry
Browne . Even now, before the first
gavel falls, the defense team will not only build a theory for the case, but
attempt to unravel the tangled knot of motivation for a predawn slaughter of
innocents.
In fact it only took Browne one
meeting with the defendant to come up with the perfect plan for starters. " I think the war is on
trial, I think the war should be on trial, and I'm hoping that the war will be
on trial."
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