A military judge said today the US Army psychiatrist on trial for the deadly 2009 Fort Hood shooting rampage can continue to represent himself, even though the defense lawyers assigned to help Nidal Hasan argue that he seems intent on getting a death sentence.
The court-assigned lawyers had asked the judge to let them take over the case, calling his actions "contrary to our professional obligations," but the judge sided with Hasan and ordered them to continue helping him in his murder trial. The lawyers then demanded to be removed from the case and said they would appeal, but the judge told them to continue their work.
The attack on fellow soldiers killed 13 and wounded more than 30 in one of the country's worst mass shootings.
Hasan doesn't argue that he was the shooter at the Texas military post as the soldiers, including himself, were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. He has tried to plead guilty, but military law requires a not-guilty plea in death penalty cases.
Hasan, a US-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, also has wanted to argue that he carried out the shooting in "defense of others" Muslim insurgents fighting US soldiers in Afghanistan but the judge denied that strategy. The judge also said he will not be able to make speeches about his beliefs.
The prosecutor, Col. Michael Mulligan, stood up during the lawyers' argument today and defended Hasan's strategy, saying Hasan would have been "absurd" 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 said.
During the trial, Hasan has posed no questions to most witnesses and has rarely spoken.
Hasan, who is paralyzed after being shot during the attack, faces a possible death sentence if convicted of the 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.
"I don't envy her. She's on the horns of a dilemma here," said Richard Rosen, a law professor at Texas Tech University and former military prosecutor who attended the first two days of trial. "I think whatever she does is potentially dangerous, at least from the view of an appellate court.
