PTSD on Trial: Sgt. Sean M. Beveridge

Using PTSD as a defense
By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Thursday, August 21, 2008



When Sgt. Sean M. Beveridge faced a court-martial last year for attacking German civilians with a retractable club in Amberg, defense attorneys and witnesses pointed to Beveridge’s service in Iraq, which they said left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Beveridge was severely wounded and had seen his buddy blown up when a suicide bomber attacked a chow hall in Mosul, killing 22 people on Dec. 21, 2004.

His father testified that Beveridge returned from Iraq in 2005 a changed man.

"He had a lot of trouble sleeping ... drank more than he had before. He had some, you know, not fights because he wasn’t in a condition to fight but, you know ... he had some incidents," Iain Beveridge said, according to transcripts of the trial.

"There was one incident where he stuck up for somebody and, you know, he got punched in the eye and couldn’t do anything about it because he called me late at night and he was getting taken to the hospital for stitches ... we tried to encourage him to get help."

More and more, post-traumatic stress disorder is being introduced as a factor in the defense and sentencing of military members during courts-martial, military attorneys and civilian legal experts say.

David Court, a civilian lawyer who’s defended U.S. troops for 30 years, said a defense counsel would be derelict not to ask a client about PTSD these days due to the number of U.S. personnel worldwide who have deployed to war zones.
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