Courts Martial

? The first of 12 U.S. soldiers accused of terrorizing unarmed civilians as part of a rogue infantry platoon in Afghanistan will face a court-martial on murder charges and other offenses, the military said Friday. U.S. Army Spc. Jeremy Morlock, 22, of Wasilla, Alaska, who could face the death penalty if convicted, is charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of three Afghan civilians he is alleged to have killed for sport. His case was referred to general court-martial this week at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash.

Just after lunch on Nov. 5, an Army psychiatrist inside the medical processing center at Ft. Hood did something that Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, the non-commissioned officer in charge at the center that day, said mystified him. He said Maj. Nidal Hasan, the psychiatrist, suddenly stood up, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" ? Arabic for "God is great" ? and reached under his uniform top. "I was wondering why he would say 'Allahu Akhbar.' " Lunsford recalled Wednesday at a hearing for Hasan, who is charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 others that day. As Lunsford struggled to make sense of what the psychiatrist was doing, he said, Hasan pulled out a handgun and opened fire on soldiers awaiting medical processing.

Alma Nemelka said her nephew was the first to die. He was standing at the rear of the Soldier Readiness Center at Ft. Hood, Texas, when an Army officer burst in shouting, " Allahu akbar! " Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19 and soon to be deployed to the Middle East, was shot in the head. On Tuesday, the man accused of killing Nemelka and 12 others, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan of the Army Medical Corps, will appear for his first broad military hearing into the November attack. Hasan, a U.S.-born Muslim and Army psychiatrist, was shot during the incident and is paralyzed from the waist down.

Three Coast Guard petty officers will be court-martialed for a 2009 fatal collision in San Diego Bay, the Coast Guard announced Wednesday. A fourth Coast Guard member will face a nonjudicial punishment process. The decision to hold a court-martial was made by Rear Adm. Joseph Castillo, commander of the 11th Coast Guard District. On the night of Dec. 20, during the annual Parade of Lights, a 33-foot Coast Guard cutter traveling at a high rate of speed smashed into a 24-foot civilian boat, injuring half a dozen members of three families and killing Anthony DeWeese, 8, who lived in the Rancho Penasquitos neighborhood of San Diego.

A Marine colonel at the center of a court-martial case about leaking secret intelligence information to civilian law enforcement agencies has died, the Marine Corps announced Tuesday. Larry Richards, a Marine reservist and retired Los Angeles County sheriff's detective, died Saturday of natural causes. He faced multiple charges and had been scheduled for an Article 32 hearing, akin to a preliminary hearing. The case involves allegations that Marines working for Richards in the intelligence division at Camp Pendleton gave him classified documents about purported terrorism threats so he could share them with an anti-terrorism task force organized by the Sheriff's Department.

Asked to describe his four years behind bars for killing an unarmed Iraqi, Marine Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III recites the opening stanza of the poem "Invictus": "Out of the night that covers me Black as the Pit from pole to pole I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul." If Hutchins, 26, is ultimately freed to return to his native Massachusetts and his 6-year-old daughter, he should also thank his lawyers and the military appeals court system.

A military appeals court Thursday overturned the conviction of a Camp Pendleton Marine in the execution-style killing of an Iraqi man in 2006 in Hamandiya, west of Baghdad. The Washington, D.C., court found that then-Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins was denied a fair trial because one of his lead attorneys was allowed to leave the case just before his court-martial. The attorney left active duty. Hutchins, 26, is serving an 11-year sentence at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. The Marine Corps has 30 days to decide whether to appeal the 8-1 decision of the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals.

A military judge Friday rejected a defense request to throw out charges against the last Marine accused in the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005. The judge, Lt. Col. David Jones, had ruled Tuesday it was possible that two generals who brought charges against Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich had been subject to what the military calls undue command influence. But Friday, Jones ruled that he saw no indication of actual influence on Gen. James Mattis or retired Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland.

Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada will be discharged by the end of the week, concluding the fight over his refusal to deploy to Iraq, an Army spokesman said Monday. After a court-martial proceeding that ended in a mistrial, the Army has elected not to attempt further prosecution and instead will discharge the first lieutenant, who argued he would be participating in war crimes if he fought in Iraq. "What was approved was basically his request to resign in lieu of a general court-martial for the good of the service," said spokesman Joseph Piek at Ft. Lewis, Wash.