The latest outrage in the sorry saga of Martin Lee Anderson's brief life and tragic death involves rumors, innuendo, and a quick tempered judge...
PANAMA CITY -- The judge kicked the victim's father out of the courtroom. The mother ran out, too upset to listen to testimony. And one defendant had to be hospitalized for stress.
Much of the drama that unfolded Wednesday in the boot camp case happened outside Circuit Judge Michael Overstreet's courtroom.
By the end of the day, neither of Martin Lee Anderson's parents was in court, and neither was defendant Joseph Walsh II.
The dead teen's mother, Gina Jones, broke down during testimony by one of the accused guards. Jones usually leaves the courtroom whenever the grainy boot camp videotape is aired. Wednesday morning she remained in her seat.
But as accused guard Charles Enfinger described physically restraining the boy -- with the boot camp video playing for jurors -- Jones ran from the room. She cried: "I can't do this!"
About two hours later, just before lunch, the judge removed the teen's father from court after accusing Robert Anderson of "making noises."
Just before lunch, defense attorney Waylon Graham complained to the judge that Anderson and several others sitting in the second row behind the prosecutors were using profanity and commenting on the evidence. It has been a pattern since the accused guards began to testify Tuesday, he said.
"We have complained and complained about it," Graham said.
This time, an investigator for the prosecutors heard it, backing up the defense attorneys' complaints, Graham said.
With the jury outside the courtroom, the judge ordered several people to stand and leave. He told them not to return to court.
Whether Mr. Anderson was talking or not is a matter of dispute:
Reporters sitting in the back of the courtroom didn't hear anything, and neither did Bettye Rouse, a courtroom spectator who was sitting right behind Anderson. She said the family had been quiet.
"I was sitting in the row behind them," she said. "I did not hear a thing."
Crump said he heard that a text message had been sent from someone in the courtroom to Graham, a message accusing Anderson of misbehaving. That's when Graham interrupted the proceedings, Crump said. ...
And Mr. Graham has an interesting take on Anderson's future:
He said the father might be able to get back into the courtroom to hear closing arguments and the verdict if he would "beg forgiveness."
"If they were in federal court, they would all be in a holding cell right now," Graham said.
And then, there's the high drama surrounding one of the defendants:
All seemed quiet until the afternoon break, when two ambulances rolled up to the back of the courthouse. Emergency crews then slipped into the courtroom and carried out Walsh on a stretcher. He wasn't moving. His eyes were closed.
His parents, who have attended much of the trial, were at his side.
Walsh, 37, was taken to Bay Medical Center, the same local hospital where Martin Lee Anderson went after he left the boot camp yard.
Walsh's father, also named Joseph Walsh, said his son was under tremendous pressure.
"Stress does this to him," said Walsh, 62, adding that his son suffers from Gulf War syndrome.
By the end of the day, there were no updates on Walsh's condition. He did not return.
...and last but not least, the obligatory O.J. connection:
All things lead to O.J. Simpson, including the boot camp trial. Absent in the glare of Court TV cameras is the wife of Bay County Circuit Judge Michael Overstreet. She made the cover of Playboy magazine in October 1994. Call her a model. Call her an actress. Simpson called her an alibi after the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Overstreet's wife? Paula Barbieri, Simpson's ex-girlfriend.
An attorney for the defense says the paramilitary atmosphere surrounding the beating of Martin Anderson at a Bay County, Florida boot camp last January was "just another day at the office." Said defense attorney Walter Smith:
The guards saw Anderson not as a 14-year-old child, but as ''a six-foot, 168-pound adult felon,'' Smith said. He had been sent to the camp for a probation violation after trespassing at a school and stealing his grandmother's car from a church parking lot.
Smith, who represents guard Charles Enfinger, said Anderson's file had been marked with a red dot -- the highest of three levels of offenders -- indicating the he had the potential for violence.
''These are not rogue officers who are trying to punish a kid,'' he said. ``Nobody is going to say that those hammer strikes or knee strikes were unlawful, they were strictly according to procedure.''
Defense attorneys maintain that Anderson's death was unavoidable because he had undiagnosed sickle cell trait, a genetic blood disorder. The usually benign disorder can cause blood cells to shrivel into a sickle shape and limit their ability to carry oxygen under physical stress.
Earlier Monday, prosecutors rested their case after the chief medical director for Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice testified that nurse Kristin Schmidt, who stood by during the altercation, did not tell her supervisors that the teen was struck and forced to inhale ammonia.
Smith said later that camp employees did not consider ammonia tablets as a use of force against the offenders, so they did not find it necessary to put that in their reports.
The trial is pretty much going according to rote -- the use of force was "justified" because of Anderson's size (he had no criminal record and had only been there one day, so i'm not sure how they determined that he was a threat), the tape magnifies the horror but it's "misleading", it was sickle cell trait that killed Anderosn, not the brutal half-hour beating by seven adult men, and the conflicting autopsies constitute reasonable doubt. Throw in an all-white jury in Jena-esque Bay County and you've got a recipe for acquittal.
The soldier who was with Pat Tillman at the time of his death contradicts the official account, including that of the chaplain who supposedly took the soldier's statement. From the AP:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like, 'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now.'"
Tillman's intent, O'Neal said, was to "more or less put my mind straight about what was going on at the moment."
"He said, 'I've got an idea to help get us out of this,'" said O'Neal, who was an 18-year-old Army Ranger in Tillman's unit when the former NFL player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.
O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed, O'Neal said.
A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman's death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O'Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain's testimony, outlined in some 2,300 pages of transcripts released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The chaplain told investigators that O'Neal said Tillman was harsh in his last moments, snapping, 'Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God's not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling ..."
"He never would have called me 'sniveling,'" O'Neal said. "I don't remember ever speaking to this chaplain, and I find this characterization of Pat really upsetting. He never once degraded me. He's the only person I ever worked for who didn't degrade anyone. He wasn't that sort of person."
The chaplain's name is blacked out in the documents.
Not to sound conspiratorial, but can you imagine what it would have meant to the Bush administration, just after the Abu Ghraib disaster, to have a famed NFL player turned warrior in Afghanistan come out publicly against the Iraq war, which Tillman may have been preparing to do? Just sayin' ... anyway, more from the AP story:
Soldiers and commanders who worked with Tillman have repeatedly testified that he was respected, admired and well-liked.
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
O'Neal said the shooters were "close, close enough for me to recognize them, but they sure weren't 10 yards away. They were further than that. I've thought about this plenty of times. They wouldn't have been more than 50 yards away."
Another key issue raised in the transcripts involved never-before-mentioned snipers who were apparently there when the firing broke out, got out of their vehicle and walked alongside the convoy, cutting up the canyon firing.
O'Neal said Saturday that he knew there were snipers in the convoy that fired at them, but that he can't remember their names. Were they fired at by the snipers? "Not that I know of," O'Neal told the AP.
His recollections of the snipers reflected other testimony in the transcripts, including answers given by Capt. Richard Scott, who conducted the first, immediate investigation:
Q: Are you aware whether or not any U.S. forces snipers were at the scene? Scott: They were in serial two.
Q: And, and do you know whose GMV (ground mobility vehicle) they were traveling in?
Scott: I don't think they were in a GMV. I think they were in a cargo Humvee.
Q: Okay. Do you know if the snipers fired any rounds during this incident involving CPL Tillman?
Scott: I do not, no.
More questions here than answers, to be sure. And while we're at it, recall that the Tillman death, and White House conversations with the military about it, are the subject of one of Fred Fielding's many executive privilege filings on behalf of President Bush... one wonders why...
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
