Marine set to be retried in California for Iraq killing

Opening arguments are due to begin on Tuesday in California in the military retrial of a U.S. Marine whose platoon killed an Iraqi civilian in the village of Hamdania in 2006, after a previous murder conviction was overturned.

Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III was initially convicted of murder, larceny and making false statements in 2007 over the killing of the civilian, a disabled former Iraqi police officer.

Hutchins, who spent six years confined in military prison while his conviction was appealed, was the leader of a squad of Marines who planned a mission aimed at stopping militants' use of improvised bombs in Hamdania in the early morning hours of April 26, 2006.

When they couldn't find the suspected bomber they had identified, witnesses said, they went to a nearby house and took a disabled former police officer who was not a suspect.

Witnesses said Hutchins and other Marines shot 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad, a father of 11 and grandfather of four, and placed an AK-47 and a shovel next to the corpse to suggest he had been planting a bomb.

The case touched off a furor in both the United States and Iraq.

In 2007, a military jury at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, found Hutchins guilty of unpremeditated murder and other crimes. He was sentenced to 15 years in a military prison, later reduced to 11 years.

But a military court overturned his conviction in 2010 after finding that a statement he gave to U.S. Navy investigators while in custody should have been ruled inadmissible.

A military appeals court reinstated his conviction the following year but overturned it again in 2013 because Hutchins had been denied access to a lawyer for a week early in the investigation. He was later restored to the rank of sergeant and worked on the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton.

In 2009, during Hutchins' first appeal, then-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the Marine Corps Times that the Hamdania killing was a cold-blooded murder and Hutchins, as ringleader, should serve the full sentence.

Mabus's remarks resurfaced during pretrial motions on Monday, as Hutchins' defense lawyers demanded the Marine Corps find a judge without ties to Mabus. Those motions have been denied.

If convicted, Hutchins could be sentenced to serve out the remainder of his 11-year term.