Soldier spared death penalty

A former US soldier convicted of raping and killing an Iraqi teenager and murdering her family was spared the death penalty after jurors couldn’t agree on a punishment for the brutal crime.

Steven Dale Green, aged 24, will instead serve a life sentence in a case that has drawn attention to the emotional and psychological strains on soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In March 2006, after an afternoon of card playing, sex talk and drinking Iraqi whisky, Green and three other soldiers went to the home of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

Green shot and killed the teenager’s mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape the girl before shooting her in the face.

Federal jurors who convicted Green of rape and murder on May 7 told the judge they couldn’t agree on the appropriate sentence after deliberating for more than 10 hours over two days.

Their choices were a death sentence or life in prison without parole. Since they could not unanimously agree on either sentence, life in prison had to be the verdict.

“It’s the better of two bad choices,” said his father, John Green, who sighed as the verdict was read.

His son will be sentenced on September 4 by US District Judge Thomas B. Russell.

Green’s attorneys never denied his involvement in the attack, instead focusing on building a case that he didn’t deserve the death penalty.

Former Marines and other soldiers with whom Green served testified that he faced an unusually stressful combat tour in Iraq in a unit that suffered heavy casualties and didn’t receive sufficient Army leadership while serving in Iraq’s Triangle of Death.

Jurors declined to comment as they were escorted out of the courthouse.

According to the jury verdict forms they filled out, several said the stress Green was under from combat and other factors in his life was a mitigating factor toward him not being sentenced to death.

Many said that the Army knowing he was having homicidal thoughts yet still returning him to the field also was a mitigator.