A former Blackwater security guard was convicted Wednesday of murder in his third trial over his involvement in a 2007 Baghdad traffic-circle shooting that marked one of the lowest points of the Iraq War.

Nicholas Slatten, who was 23 years old at the time of the shooting, was found guilty of one count of murder by a jury after a monthlong trial in federal court in Washington. </s> The second murder trial of a former Blackwater security guard over the 2007 killing of a civilian in Baghdad was ruled a mistrial Wednesday, a year after his first conviction was thrown out.

Washington federal judge Royce Lamberth declared a mistrial in the case of Nicholas Slatten, 34, after a jury reported last week they were at an impasse and could not reach a unanimous verdict.

Slatten was one of four armed guards for the former US security contractor Blackwater Worldwide who were found guilty in 2014 of murder for the notorious killings in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

While escorting a diplomatic convoy on September 16, 2007, they opened fire with sniper rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers, allegedly without provocation, in the bustling square, leaving at least 14 civilians dead and at least 17 wounded. The Iraqi government says the toll was higher.

The shooting deepened the resentment of Americans in Iraq four years after US forces toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, and raised questions about the expanded use of armed contract guards by the US government.

Slatten was originally sentenced in 2015 to life in prison as the alleged first person to have opened fire.

The three others were given 30 year prison sentences, although Lamberth at the time of sentencing said that: "It's clear these fine young men just panicked."

An appeals court, accepting later evidence that another guard was the first to fire, overturned Slatten's guilty verdict and ordered a new trial for him alone.

He faced one charge of first degree murder of a single Iraqi, Ahmed Haithem Ahmed al Rubia'y.

A spokesman for the court said federal prosecutors were reviewing the case. They can choose to ask for a new trial, or decide not to pursue it further. </s> A former Blackwater security contractor has been convicted of murder at his third trial in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq.

Nicholas Slatten, of Sparta, Tennessee, was found guilty of first-degree murder Wednesday in Washington.

Prosecutors say Slatten was the first to fire shots in the killings of 14 Iraqi civilians at a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad. The shooting strained relations with Iraq and drew intense scrutiny of the role of American contractors in the Iraq War.

The defense had argued that Slatten opened fire because he thought a bomb-laden car was headed toward his convoy.

An appeals court had overturned his 2014 conviction, saying he should have been tried separately from three other men. A jury couldn't reach a verdict in his second trial last summer. </s> The retrial of a Blackwater security guard convicted of first-degree murder in 2014 resulted in a hung jury Wednesday, dealing a blow to the Justice Department’s long pursuit of accountability for a 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians that drew international condemnation during the Iraq War.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia declared a mistrial after a jury of seven women and five men said it was deadlocked on the 16th day of deliberations in the case of Nicholas A. Slatten. Slatten, 34, was accused of unleashing the first shots that set off machine gun and grenade fire that killed or injured 31 civilians in stopped traffic at Baghdad’s Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007.

Charges were first brought against six Blackwater employees in 2008 and over the next decade their cases careered among trial and appeals courts.

It was the second time Slatten faced trial for murder in the shooting rampage that outraged diplomatic and humanitarian circles and sparked calls to end the U.S. government’s use of private military forces.

The retrial jury had indicated in a note last week to the judge that it was at an impasse and asked “please advise.” The judge sent them home for the weekend and asked them to try again to reach a verdict when they returned to court Tuesday.

A jury in Washington, D.C., in October 2014 convicted Slatten of murder and three fellow Blackwater Worldwide guards of 30 counts of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter. The team was part of a convoy protecting State Department personnel.

A federal appeals court last August ordered a new trial for Slatten, saying he should have been tried separately from a co-defendant, Paul A. Slough, 38, who told investigators days after the shootings that he, not Slatten, fired the first rounds in the incident.

Slatten, of Sparta, Tennessee, had been imprisoned in Sumterville, Florida, serving a mandatory life sentence, before being moved to Virginia and the District of Columbia for retrial.

Prosecutors still face resentencings of three other convicted defendants, Slough, of Keller, Texas, Evan S. Liberty, 36, of Rochester, New Hampshire., and Dustin L. Heard, 37, of Maryville, Tennessee.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that vacated Slatten’s conviction last year also set aside the 30-year terms handed to the defendants in 2014 , saying the sentences violated a constitutional prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The three men received twice the maximum punishment for manslaughter alone after being convicted of using military firearms while committing a felony, an enhanced penalty that was primarily aimed at gang members and had never been used against security contractors given military weapons by the U.S. government.

In a 2-to-1 ruling, the panel said it did not intend to minimize the carnage attributable to the men, saying “their poor judgments resulted in the deaths of many innocent people,” but called for more “nuanced” penalties based on each’s wrongdoing rather than “sledgehammer” treatment.

Lamberth, the judge in both trials, had deferred resentencing until the outcome of Slatten’s retrial.

During the long history of the Blackwater prosecution one guard, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and testified against Slatten in both of Slatten’s trials, although he also said he believed Slough fired first. Prosecutors withdrew charges against one other Blackwater convoy member, citing a lack of evidence.

A federal judge initially threw out the other indictments in 2009, saying prosecutors improperly relied on statements the guards have given State Department investigators immediately after the shooting believing their statements would not be used in court.

Another three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit reversed that ruling in 2011, clearing the way for prosecutors to obtain fresh indictments against Slatten and the three others.

However, prosecutors took so long to charge Slatten that the statutory time limit for bringing a manslaughter charge had expired, an error the appeals court panel contributed to an errant ruling, a court found.

The Justice Department responded by charging Slatten, a former Army sniper, with first-degree murder, which has no statute of limitations, but required a higher burden of proof, including premeditation, which prosecutors labored this summer to meet.

Slatten’s defense also got a new boost when a key government witness – Jimmy Watson, the leader of the four-vehicle convoy who was seated next to Slatten – retreated from his previously strong, repeated testimony that he had heard Slatten fire first.

Watson, whom Slatten’s attorneys said suffered a brain injury in a diving accident while a Navy SEAL, appeared “a bit of a shell of himself” on the stand in the retrial, lead prosecutor Patrick Martin acknowledged, “looking off into the distance” and speaking in a muted tone and cadence.
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• East Bay man gets 2 years for ‘misleading’ concert promoters about Red Hot Chili Peppers But Martin asked jurors to remember “the 2013 Watson,” who without hesitation and “clear as a bell” said seven times– in recorded grand jury testimony that was played at the retrial–that he heard Slatten fire first, then Slough.

“He was not the Mr. Watson of 2013 . . . You saw a different man up here, and that was unfortunate,” Martin said in the government’s closing arguments. “But the 2013 Watson gives you the testimony you need” to find Slatten guilty. </s> A mistrial was declared Wednesday in the retrial of a former Blackwater security guard convicted of murder in 2014 for his role in a mass shooting of unarmed Iraqi civilians that touched off an international firestorm.

Nicholas Slatten, 34, of Sparta, Tenn., went on trial for a second time in June, accused of instigating the killing of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians and the wounding of 17 others, including women and children in 2007 near Baghdad’s Nisour Square.

The latest decision was a setback for the Justice Department, which had long sought to hold Slatten and five other employees of the military contracting firm accountable for the incident.

Slatten, a former Army sniper, allegedly fired the initial shots, spurring a fusillade of machine gun and grenade fire. The Justice Department first charged him and five others in 2008.

Slatten’s original sentence of life in prison for first-degree murder was overturned in 2017 by the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit after they ruled a lower court had erred by not allowing him to be tried separately from his three co-defendants in 2014.

But jurors in the subsequent retrial were deadlocked on the 16th day of deliberations. Jurors had indicated in a note to the judge last week that it had reached an impasse, the Washington Post reported. They had been sent home for the weekend and asked to return to court Tuesday.

This story is developing. Check back for updates </s> Nicholas Slatten, a 35-year old former security guard for the private mercenary firm Blackwater, was found guilty of first-degree murder on Wednesday in the third trial stemming from his role in the notorious 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, Iraq that left 14 Iraqis civilians dead and another 17 injured.

The jury's verdict on Wednesday came after a three-judge federal appeals court panel ordered a retrial for Slatten and resentencing for three of his Blackwater colleagues—Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, and Paul Slough—in August of 2017. Slatten's second murder trial ended in a mistrial in September. While no sentencing date has been set, the murder charge means he faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

Outlining the government's evidence for the case, the U.S. Attorney's office in D.C. said in a statement:

[At] approximately noon on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007, several Blackwater security contractors, including Slatten and his former co-defendants, opened fire in and around Nisour Square, a busy traffic circle in the heart of Baghdad. When they stopped shooting, 14 Iraqi civilians were dead. Those killed included 10 men, two women, and two boys, ages 9 and 11. Another 18 victims were injured. According to the evidence, Slatten was the first to fire, without provocation, killing Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia'y, an aspiring doctor, who was driving his mother to an appointment.

Slatten's murder conviction is for Ahmed's death. As the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday:

Patrick Martin, who is chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney's office in Washington, D.C., told jurors last month that Mr. Slatten had fired the first shots at the traffic circle, setting off the chaotic episode. Mr. Slatten carefully planned to kill the driver of a white Kia, acting out of "hate, prejudice, and some twisted notion of revenge," Mr. Martin said in opening statements.

"You know that this man took this sniper rifle, and through this scope he took aim at Ahmed's head, and he fired. Boom. And he fired again. Boom. And why?" prosecutor Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez reportedly said to jurors in his closing arguments. "Because, ladies and gentlemen, he thought he could get away with it. Nobody would know. He would never have to answer to people like you sitting in this jury room today."

Slatten is being held until he is sentenced by Judge Royce C. Lamberth, according to the U.S. Attorney's office—which added that "Slough, Liberty, and Heard remain in custody and their re-sentencing proceedings remain pending before Judge Lamberth." Meanwhile, Blackwater's infamous former CEO, Erik Prince, has yet to face any consequences for incident.

"Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable," journalist Jeremy Scahill—author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army—wrote for The Intercept after the first trial in 2014. "Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries."

Although Prince has since sold off Blackwater, which relaunched as Academi, the billionaire war profiteer—who happens to be the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—served as an adviser to President Donald Trump's transition team and has continued to advocate for the use of mercenaries, urging the administration to privatize the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. </s> The Western Journal has not reviewed this Associated Press story prior to publication. Therefore, it may contain editorial bias or may in some other way not meet our normal editorial standards. It is provided to our readers as a service from The Western Journal.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former Blackwater security contractor has been convicted of murder at his third trial in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq.

Nicholas Slatten, of Sparta, Tennessee, was found guilty of first-degree murder Wednesday in Washington.

Prosecutors say Slatten was the first to fire shots in the killings of 14 Iraqi civilians at a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad. The shooting strained relations with Iraq and drew intense scrutiny of the role of American contractors in the Iraq War.

The defense had argued that Slatten opened fire because he thought a bomb-laden car was headed toward his convoy.

An appeals court had overturned his 2014 conviction, saying he should have been tried separately from three other men. A jury couldn’t reach a verdict in his second trial last summer.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards. </s> WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has sentenced a former Blackwater security contractor to life in prison for his role in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq.

Judge Royce Lamberth issued the sentence Wednesday after friends and relatives requested leniency for Nicholas Slatten, who was found guilty of first-degree murder by a jury in December.

Prosecutors charged that Slatten was the first to fire shots in the September 2007 massacre of Iraqi civilians at a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad. In all, 10 men, two women and two boys, ages 9 and 11, were killed.

The defense had argued that Slatten and other Blackwater contractors opened fire only after they saw what they mistakenly thought was a potential suicide car bomber moving quickly toward their convoy. </s> FILE – In this June 11, 2014, file photo, former Blackwater Worldwide guard Nicholas Slatten enters a taxi cab as he leaves federal court in Washington, after the start of his trial. A federal judge has sentenced a former Blackwater security contractor to life in prison for his role in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has sentenced a former Blackwater security contractor to life in prison for his role in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq.

Judge Royce Lamberth issued the sentence Wednesday after friends and relatives requested leniency for Nicholas Slatten, who was found guilty of first-degree murder by a jury in December.

Prosecutors charged that Slatten was the first to fire shots in the September 2007 massacre of Iraqi civilians at a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad. In all, 10 men, two women and two boys, ages 9 and 11, were killed.

The defense had argued that Slatten and other Blackwater contractors opened fire only after they saw what they mistakenly thought was a potential suicide car bomber moving quickly toward their convoy.
In a third trial, Nicholas Slatten is sentenced to life in prison.