Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier charged with killing 16 Afghan civilians in what is considered the deadliest war crime by a single American soldier in the post-9/11 era, will plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, his lawyer said Wednesday.
In a brief interview as he rushed into a meeting with Sergeant Bales, John Henry Browne, the lawyer, said military prosecutors at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., had agreed to the plea, which could be made before a military judge next week.
A spokesman for the base, Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield, said he could not confirm whether a deal had been struck or whether the two sides were in negotiations over a plea. But he said a plea hearing had been tentatively scheduled for next Wednesday.
"John Henry Browne is probably not saying it just to be saying it," Colonel Dangerfield said. "But I can't confirm whether they are in talks."
Sergeant Bales, 39, has been charged with walking off a small outpost in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province early on the morning of March 11, 2012, and shooting or stabbing to death 16 people, most of them children, in two villages. He was apprehended as he returned to his base.
The soldier's lawyers have not explicitly argued that he did not commit the killings. Instead they have suggested that he might have been under the influence of alcohol, medications or steroids at the time of the crime. They have also suggested at various points that the sergeant, who was on his fourth combat deployment, might have had post-traumatic stress disorder or a traumatic brain injury.
At Sergeant Bales's Article 32 hearing, the military's version of a grand jury proceeding, a fellow soldier testified last fall that the sergeant had told him that he had "shot up some people." A lab examiner also testified that the sergeant had blood from at least four people on his clothes when taken into custody.
