The four men, all veterans, worked for the now-defunct Blackwater Worldwide security firm, which had been contracted by the State Department to provide protection for U.S. diplomats in Iraq.
Investigators for the military and the FBI later described the shootings, in which the contractors unleashed a blaze of gunfire and grenade explosions in a busy Baghdad square, as unprovoked and unjustified. Federal prosecutors said that many of the victims, including women and children, some with their hands in the air, “were shot inside of civilian vehicles while attempting to flee.”
The incident came during a particularly dark period of the Iraq War and led to outcries in Iraq and the United States that private contractors — many of them former military personnel — were unsupervised and given unaccountable power in war zones.
U.S. refusal to allow the men to be tried in an Iraqi court led to a crisis in already-tense relations between the two countries. U.S. charges against them were dismissed in 2009 by a federal judge, who ruled that the Justice Department had mishandled evidence.
Then-vice president Joe Biden, speaking at a Baghdad news conference, expressed disappointment and said the Obama administration would appeal the decision.
“A dismissal is not an acquittal,” Biden said.
In subsequent years, as the case continued, the contractors became known in conservative media as the “Biden Four.”
In 2011, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals reinstated the charges, a ruling the Supreme Court declined to review.
When the case went to trial in 2014, a jury found that Slatten had fired the first shots and convicted him of first-degree murder, making him liable for a life sentence. The other three, convicted of voluntary manslaughter, were each sentenced to 30 years in prison. Lawyers for the four men maintained throughout that the incident should be treated as a battlefield encounter and not a criminal act, and that they had come under attack.
A U.S. appeals court threw out Slatten’s conviction in 2017 on grounds that he should have been allowed to separate his case from the others. It also ordered resentencing for Slough, Liberty and Heard, saying that the 30-year terms violated the constitutional prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-pardon-blackwater-contractors-iraq/2020/12/22/603da1f4-44b8-11eb-a277-49a6d1f9dff1_story.html
