Attorneys for Jeremy Morlock, one of the five US Soldiers “charged with premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit premeditated murder” are now moving to suppress the young corporal’s statements because he outlined the plot to “randomly kill civillians…in Kandahar” while suffering brain trauma and under the influence of truth serum, sleep deprivation, muscle relaxants. Which, of course, sounds more than vaguely similar to the conditions under which one is compelled to confess while being tortured…
Though such a defense, at first, seems both simple and reasonable enough, the corporal will likely run into trouble should any media savvy super-attorney respond to breaking claims that the entire unit was “consumed with drug use.”
And while one may argue that “he was taking medication prescribed by military doctors for sleep deprivation, pain and muscle relaxing,” and that “they could not yet establish exactly when he had taken the medication and how it might have affected him,” couldn’t the same argument then be made for his actions in the field?
Shouldn’t this statement alone give us enough expert evidence to build a case of drug induced temporary insanity? (If only he’d been on caffeine as well…)
Of the unit’s drug abuse, the New York Times reports: When asked by an investigator when and how often the unit used illegal drugs,” one unit member “said that the drug use occurred on ‘bad days, stressful days, days that we just needed to escape.’
How often that could be is certainly up for debate; but it’s hard to believe that there may have even been a good one after reading reports that “members of the platoon mutilated Afghan corpses and even collected fingers and other body parts, and that some posed for photos with Afghan corpses.”
Which begs the question of whether a man can be held to the same standards when confessing to a crime, as when acting one out… as well as where the vicious cycle started: did these soldiers start killing civilians because they were drugged up, or did they get drugged up because they’d started killing civilians?
Though the order may not matter as much as the crime itself, to support a confession while under the influence of drugs and brain damage, would be to set a rather dubious precedent for the acceptable conditions under which to question US Citizen no matter what they’ve been accused of.
Source: Huffington Post
