On March 23, 2003, during the attack on Baghdad, Hasan K. Akbar, a sergeant with the 101st AIrborne DIvision’s 326th Engineer Battalion, threw several fragmentation and incendiary grenades into the tents of his officers, followed by gunfire of his M4 rifle. Killing Army Captain Christopher S. Seifert and Idaho Air National Guard Major Gregory L. Stone were killed in the attack. In his diary, Akbar had promised to “kill as many of them as possible” in February. <\/p>\n
At his trial in April, 2005, Akbar’s defense lawyers failed to prove to the panel of military jurors that he was innocent by reason of insanity and they convicted him in about 2 1\/2 hours of “fragging” the two officers and sentenced him to death. In 2012, the Army Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the sentence and last week, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces rejected Akbar’s claims that his defense in the original trial had been incompetent, according to the Sacramento Bee<\/a>;<\/p>\n \u201cWe conclude that if there ever was a case where a military court-martial panel would impose the death penalty, this was it,\u201d Judge Kevin A. Ohlson wrote.<\/p>\n The court\u2019s 3-2 decision leaves Akbar one of six military men to be facing execution at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Leavenworth, Kan. Though he had launched a wide-ranging challenge to his conviction and sentence, a big part of the case decided Wednesday dealt with his claim of ineffective counsel.<\/p>\n […]<\/p>\n Ohlson, a former Army paratrooper and federal prosecutor appointed to the court by President Barack Obama, observed that Akbar was \u201crepresented by two experienced military attorneys who devoted more than two years to preparing and presenting the defense in this case.\u201d<\/p>\n The two dissenting judges countered that Akbar\u2019s trial defense attorneys fell short, with specific mistakes that included providing Akbar\u2019s 313-page diary to the court-martial panel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The decision clears the way for Akbar’s execution. The Army hasn’t executed a prisoner since 1961 when John A. Bennet was executed by hanging for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl while he was stationed there in 1954.<\/p>\n Akbar has five neighbors on the Defense Department’s death row; Ronald A. Gray, a spree-killer from Fort Bragg, NC, who was sentenced in 1988, Dwight J. Loving who killed two taxi cab drivers at Fort Hood, Texas, who was sentenced in 1989, Andrew P. Witt, a former airman who committed a double murder at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia and sentenced in 2005, Timothy B. Hennis, sentenced for a triple murder while he was stationed at Fort Bragg, and Nidal Malik Hasan awaiting the needle for thirteen murders at Fort Hood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"