Trump's pardon of U.S. contractors convicted of Iraqi massacre is an injustice: lawyer

Transcript

When U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned four security contractors who gunned down 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians, he stripped their families of justice and undermined the U.S. court system, says lawyer Gary Mauney.

Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten and Paul Slough were working with the U.S. security firm Blackwater in 2007 when they shot and killed 14 people, including two children, in Baghdad's Nisoor Square.

The men maintained their innocence throughput their trial, insisting they were fired on first. But an investigation found none of the victims had weapons or posed any threat to the Blackwater convoy. 

In 2014, a Washington Court ruled the four had opened fire with machine-guns, grenade launchers and a sniper rifle on a crowd at the busy traffic circle. Slough, Liberty and Heard were convicted of voluntary and attempted manslaughter, while Slatten, who opened fire first, was convicted of first-degree murder.

But now they're all free men, as Trump continues his spree of presidential pardons during his final months in office. 

Mauney, a North Carolina lawyer, represented the victims' families in a civil suit for wrongful death against Blackwater. Here is part of his conversation with As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. 

What message do these pardons send to your former clients?

The power of the pardon is typically used in this country to correct injustices. And I think here that it's done nothing but revive or perpetuate the initial injustice from 2007.

Can you take us back to September 2007 to the day that this all happened?

On Sept. 16, 2007, a convoy of Blackwater contractors exited the Green Zone in Iraq, which was the safe zone where the military was kept and and resided … without permission, and they drove to … a large traffic square in Iraq, in Baghdad, known as Nisoor Square.

And at some point, one of the members of the convoy, I don't know exactly why he reacted as he did, but he began shooting at the oncoming cars in Nisoor Square. And these were just innocent civilians that happened to be passing through the square.

One of them was a taxi driver, and his name was Mahde Naser. He was 25. And he was shot, killed.

Another of our clients, my client, was a gentleman named Abrahem Mafraje. He was a [77]-year-old farmer. He was also in a vehicle. He was the father of seven.

Another one of my clients was really the public face, probably, to the massacre. His name was Ali Kinani. He was a nine-year-old boy. It's very difficult to talk about even after all this time.

Little Ali was in the car with his father, who was in the automobile business. He was a businessman. And little Ali was shot in the head and killed. They didn't even realize that he had been shot at the time. They thought they had managed to get through what had happened without any harm to themselves or their family. But then they realized that the boy had been killed.

The contractors who opened fire had claimed that they had been attacked. Was there ever any evidence of that?

No.

What happened was the United States Army and a counter-terrorism unit from the FBI … investigated the scene of the massacre and determined that it was a completely unprovoked shooting. 

It was determined that in no way was this the fault of any of the people that were harmed there on that day. Nor were they shot at by someone adjacent or around the Nisoor Square area. 

Some of your clients ended up giving evidence for the criminal trial against these guards. Can you tell us the lengths they had to go to to pursue this case against Blackwater?

These folks had to fly over here. They had to be prepared for testimony. And they did all this at great risk to themselves because, as everybody will recall, it was a war zone in Iraq for many years. 

The very first witness was little Ali's father, Mohammed Kinani. I believe he testified for two days ... about the death of his little boy.

One of the things that stands out in my mind is that Gen. [Raymond] Odierno and our government mailed condolence cheques — I don't remember the amount, it was a small amount — to the Kinani family. And Mrs. Kinani took half of that cheque that our government had sent to their family as a condolence … to the American embassy to make a donation on behalf of the American soldiers that had fallen in Iraq over the course of the war.

So these were really awesome families. And this was a very tragic event. People that were caring for their families and loving their sons and daughters, and just happened to be in that traffic square, Nisoor Square, on that day in September of 2007. 

[Brian Heberlig], one of the lawyers for the Blackwater guards involved has said, you know, he's "overwhelmed with emotion" at this fantastic news, saying that the clients "did not deserve to spend one minute in prison." How difficult is it for you to hear that?

They were tried by their peers in a jury trial and found guilty, and they were sentenced like any other accused person would be in the United States. And so I can understand why they would be happy to receive the pardon, and why their families would be glad to have them, but I'm not sure that's justice.

The justice here was the justice that was achieved by the American federal prosecutors that worked so hard to prosecute them, [and] by the jury that … heard the evidence.

In the opinion of someone that probably knows as much about what happened as just about anybody in the United States, I can say that justice was served by that jury that heard this case, and that justice was not served by the issuance of this pardon.

The founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, has close ties to the Trump administration. He's the brother of Mr. Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos. When you think of that, I mean, what light does that cast on these pardons?

When we represented these Iraqi families in the American court system, we didn't seek to blame [then-president] George Bush for what happened or to turn this into some political event. What we tried to do was to focus on the victims, whether something unlawful had happened to them, and then to seek justice for them.

And so to the degree that this has been turned into some kind of political football, I do think that that part is wrong. To the degree that politics has played a role in this, and that the politics of this could have superseded the outcome and the verdict of a jury that heard the evidence, I do think that's wrong.

I don't know that I'm the right one to talk about the politics of this. What I can say is that from a lawyer's perspective, the pardon power is there to correct injustices where they may be —  a sentence that's too long, a person that's been wrongfully convicted. And in this case, I don't believe that these particular defendants, the Blackwater shooters from that convoy, fall into that category.

[Editor's Note: Prince cut ties with Blackwater in 2010, though he continued to work in the field. Blackwater has since relaunched as Academi, and has continued to work contracts for the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and, according to Vice News, Canada's Department of National Defence.]

When you do get a chance to speak with their clients, what will you say to them?

That we love them, that we wish them the best … that there are Americans that deeply believe in our system of justice, and that when there are wrongs like this, that America is a place that you can come and expect to be treated fairly and justly.

Even back when this case came to my law firm and there were questions that we were frequently asked: "Can these Muslim families receive a fair shake here in our justice system?" And our answer to that question was, "We believe that they could." And they did.

And this step by the president certainly unwinds it. But it doesn't change what the American citizens did in standing up for them and against what happened in Nisoor Square on Sept. 16, 2007.

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Kevin Robertson. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.