Did Sgt. Robert Bales Receive Fair Trial?

Just a reminder of what else was reported before Bales was convicted,

Antimalarial Drug Linked to Sgt. Robert Bales Massacre
ABC News
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
Digital Reporter
via GOOD MORNING AMERICA
July 22, 2013

Mefloquine was developed by the U.S. military and has been used for more than three decades by the government to prevent and to treat malaria among soldiers and Peace Corps workers.

But the drug can cause varying neurological side effects 5 to 10 percent of the time, according to Dr. David Sullivan, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in Baltimore.

The manufacturer also warns against prescribing it to anyone who has suffered a seizure or brain injury, according to the drug label.

Bales told a military court he had "no good reason" to kill.

As you can see in the latest report, that was exactly what he sought treatment for,

Robert Bales makes bid for mercy: ‘There isn’t a why; there is only pain’
The News Tribune
BY ADAM ASHTON
Staff writer
June 6, 2015

He sought treatment for head injuries and PTSD at Madigan Army Medical Center in 2011 but was convinced doctors were not helping him. “He just kept telling me my anger was a mask for another emotion. What emotion! The only thing I felt was weak was talking about emotions.”

The soldier who committed the worst atrocities of the Afghanistan War acknowledged while asking for a reduced sentence last year that he had lost compassion for Iraqis and Afghans over the course of his four combat deployments with a Joint Base Lewis-McChord Stryker brigade.

“My mind was consumed by war,” the former Staff Sgt. Robert Bales wrote in a letter late last year to the senior Army officer at JBLM.

“I planted war and hate for the better part of 10 years and harvested violence,” he wrote. “After being in prison two years, I understand that what I thought was normal was the farthest thing from being normal.”

Bales, who was sentenced in August 2013 to life in prison for the killings of 16 Afghan civilians, including seven children, failed to persuade Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza to overturn his conviction or modify his sentence. Lanza in March rejected Bales’ clemency bid after considering the weight of evidence in Bales’ court-martial, I Corps spokesman Col. Dave Johnson said Friday.

The News Tribune on Friday obtained 27 pages of letters Bales and his loved ones wrote to Lanza last fall while the general was considering whether to uphold Bales’ conviction. The set included letters from Bales’ wife, his in-laws and several soldiers who knew him on his earlier Iraq deployments when he was regarded as a sound infantryman.

His veteran friends described the qualities that led them to trust Bales in Iraq and expressed their remorse that they were not in Afghanistan with him at the time of his crimes.

“My only regret in life is that I wasn’t there in Afghanistan when Robert really needed a friend to see that he was struggling and pull him from the edge,” a JBLM staff sergeant wrote on Bales’ behalf.
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