Military Judge Releases Navy SEAL Charged With Murder

Speaker 1: 00:00 The wife of accused war criminal Edward Gallagher says yesterday, surprise, court ruling feels quote like a small victory on the way to a larger victory. Here's Andrea Gallagher. Speaker 2: 00:10 I have been fighting for my husband for so long and for his freedom and sometimes felt like that was never going to happen. And then today it happened. I mean, I just feel like it's a, just a huge step in the right direction. Speaker 1: 00:25 Gallagher was released Thursday after a hearing over allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Now it's not clear if the trial of navy seal chief Edward Gallagher accused of murdering and rocky prisoner will move forward. KPBS is military reporters. Steve Walsh was in the courtroom and he joins us now. Steve, welcome. Hi Maureen. So what was the reaction to judge Roos announcement that he was releasing Gallagher from custody? Speaker 3: 00:50 It was surprised. Even the defense counsel was surprising. Speaker 4: 00:54 I think that the entire day was surprising. Uh, you know, right from the beginning, just the, the way that the witnesses went, the way that the arguments went. And of course that big surprise at the end, Speaker 3: 01:05 Gallagher was expected to remain in custody until trial. You know, Gallagher was in custody in the brig at Miramar from, it's in September 11th the reason he's in the brig is because he's accused of intimidating witnesses in the investigation and he had been tremendous amount of publicity here. President Trump intervened and tweeted out that he should be removed to less restrictive confinement. So we went from the Brigit Miramar over to the naval hospital in San Diego and that's where he's been and that's where he was expected to be until the trial began. Speaker 1: 01:38 Let me take a step backward for a minute, Steve and remind us what Edward Gallagher is accused of. Speaker 3: 01:44 What he's accused of is killing a wounded isis fighter in his custody and then bragging about it in text messages. Also, he's accused of killing an elderly man and a young woman with his sniper rifle. There is also a charge of posing with a corpse and then sending it out as a text message with the caption got 'em with my hunting knife. Speaker 1: 02:03 So these charges are extremely severe. Why did the judge say Gallagher should be released? Speaker 3: 02:10 Well in part it's because of of what we were in court yesterday all about, which is the whole idea of the defense says that it's been spied on. There's a motion to dismiss. In this case, Speaker 1: 02:23 the judge said Gallagher should be released as a remedy for prosecutors interfering with his sixth amendment right to counsel. Now, the defense has argued for quite some time that the prosecutors in a way infiltrated the defense and their ability to defend their client. Can you tell us more about that? Sure, sure. Speaker 3: 02:42 What was on the table is this motion to dismiss and that is for prosecutorial misconduct. Basically, the defense is saying that the prosecutors were spying on them. They placed an email, a tracker in the, in emails to a the defense and one reporter call Paul Ryan with Navy Times. They were trying to find the source of hundreds of pages of leaked documents. The defense is calling all of this spying. Speaker 1: 03:05 What are the prosecutors have to say in response to these claims? Speaker 3: 03:08 Well, they've been pretty quiet about this. These are defense emotions. But we did hear testimony yesterday where, uh, expert witnesses kind of drill down into exactly what these email trackers were. What we've found is they can track the Ip address, the name dates, and a few other elements, uh, of, of what's going on in the email. Now the, the judge is saying that he was not aware that this tracker was put on email, sent to defense, and to, to navy times, uh, prosecutors. Again, they'd seem just obsess over the of these leaks, which are hundreds of pages of documents that went out to the New York Times, the Uti and to navy times. We found out yesterday that NCS and the US Attorney's office, we're basically conducting a criminal investigation into these leaks. But all of that was halted as of May 10th when the judge got wind of what was going on. Speaker 1: 03:56 And at first the defense said that the judge might have been aware of it and they asked that he agree cues himself. That's not something that they're asking for anymore, Speaker 3: 04:05 right? They, they actually withdrew that motion first. So first they had to make sure that the judge was still going to be the judge in this case. Um, they now agree with the judge that he was not aware to the extent that they were being tracked. So coming up today they'll have to decide whether or not prosecutors should step down because of this or overall they could agree to the motion to dismiss and all of this could be thrown out. Speaker 1: 04:28 What effect do you think of dismissal would have on the military's effort to prosecute war crimes? Speaker 3: 04:34 You've already had several generals and, and um, and retired admirals. Talk about, uh, the impact of a pardon and this would be much the same thing. We have to keep in mind. We have not really heard the prosecutor's case in this. We have seven navy seals who are set to testify in this case. The allegations are incredibly severe that Gallagher killed or wounded teenage prisoner in his custody shot two people with a sniper rifle and members of his own units are the ones who turned him in. But we've really not seen any of that because the trial hasn't really gotten underway. Speaker 1: 05:08 And so we'll have to see what happens. Today. I've been speaking with KPBS military reporter Steve Walsh. Thank you so much. Thanks, Maria. Speaker 5: 05:16 [inaudible].