An all-Marine jury of three enlisted men and three officers found Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins III guilty of unpremeditated murder. They also found him guilty of conspiracy and larceny, but acquitted him of making a false report about the 2006 incident.
Hutchins was allowed to go home following the trial, but returned for sentencing on Thursday, when he learned the jury recommended he serve no additional prison time. The trial's convening authority, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., can modify the recommendation over the coming weeks should he decide to do so.
Hutchins, whose previous conviction was overturned twice on appeal, served more than six years of an 11-year sentence behind bars, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and then the brig at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. He has been free since 2013, awaiting retrial.
In 2007, Hutchins was convicted of dragging 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad from his home in the village of Hamdania, throwing him in a hole, killing him and then planting an AK-47 to make it look like the victim was an insurgent.
Hutchins twice had his conviction overturned after military courts ruled that there were errors in the handling of his case.
The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the military's highest court, ruled in 2013 that Navy interrogators in Iraq at the time violated Hutchins' rights by holding him in solitary confinement for seven days without access to a lawyer.
The other members of Hutchins' squad – six other Marines and a Navy corpsman – were convicted of lesser crimes in the incident and served less than 18 months behind bars.
All but one of Hutchins' former seven squad mates refused to testify at his retrial. Many have said they now do not stand behind the statements they gave to military interrogators in 2006.
The prosecution told the court that Hutchins' squad mates did not want to testify because they did not want to "come in and talk about the disgusting thing they did." In their affidavits stating their refusal to testify, the soldiers "never claimed they didn't murder the man," the prosecutor said.
The one former squad member who did testify said that Hutchins, as he looked at the dead man, told the others, "Gents, congratulations, we just got away with murder."
The prosecution also accused Hutchins of lying to investigators at the crime scene when he told them the shooting was justified because the Iraqi man had fired upon the squad and had been digging a hole for a roadside bomb.
