This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Heart on Disaster Reporting.
WASHINGTON — A colonel within the Marine Corps was named Thursday to preside because the navy choose within the long-running dying penalty trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 4 different prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who’re accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.
The colonel, Stephen F. Keane, is at the moment serving because the circuit navy choose at Camp Pendleton, Calif., the senior choose on the West Coast for the Marine Corps. Earlier than that he was commanding officer of Safety and Emergency Providers at Camp Pendleton, liable for the brig, firefighting and policing on the sprawling 125,000-acre set up with 38,000 residents and about 30,000 commuters.
The appointment by the chief of the navy commissions judiciary, Col. Douglas Okay. Watkins of the Military, removes one impediment to resuming pretrial hearings within the case that has largely been on maintain all through the coronavirus pandemic.
The earlier choose, Col. W. Shane Cohen of the Air Pressure, abruptly stated in March that he would give up the case to retire from the service over the summer time, citing household causes.
Colonel Cohen’s departure, coupled with coronavirus-related journey restrictions, disrupted a timetable of hearings and submitting deadlines that he had set within the hopes of beginning the trial at Guantánamo subsequent yr. Mr. Mohammed is accused of being the mastermind and the opposite 4 defendants are accused of choosing, coaching or serving to with the journey and funds of the 19 males who hijacked industrial airplanes on Sept. 11, killing almost 3,000 individuals in New York, in Pennsylvania and on the Pentagon.
No hearings within the case have been held at Guantánamo since February, partly due to a sophisticated two-week quarantine requirement for newcomers to the bottom to safeguard its 6,000 residents. (Forty of them are prisoners and 1,500 of them are troopers assigned to the wartime jail.)
Prosecutors desirous to resume the hearings have devised a skeletal plan to airlift 50 or extra individuals to the court docket, together with legal professionals, translators, court docket reporters and the chief choose and his employees for 45 days, beginning with the two-week quarantine.
Colonel Watkins, who had dealt with the Sept. 11 case on a caretaker foundation, rejected the proposal for a session from September to October. It’s more likely to be as much as Colonel Keane to determine whether or not to simply accept a brand new proposal from the prosecution to airlift the choose and legal professionals to the bottom on Oct. 31 for 2 weeks of quarantine inside trailers on the battle court docket complicated, Camp Justice. Hearings that will run by means of the Thanksgiving vacation and finish on Dec. 23 would comply with.
On the navy commissions, new judges are questioned by each protection and prosecution legal professionals, who then get a possibility to problem a choose based mostly on potential or precise conflicts of curiosity. Protection legal professionals unsuccessfully sought to exclude an earlier Marine Corps choose who presided briefly within the case, Col. Keith A. Parrella, as a result of he had accomplished a one-year fellowship as a prosecutor within the Justice Division’s nationwide safety division, which has two key prosecutors assigned to the Sept. 11 case at Guantánamo.
Colonel Keane additionally had the fellowship, extra not too long ago, in 2012 and 2013.
A navy biography describes him as “raised within the Bronx, New York and Spring Heights, N.J.” He enlisted within the Marine Corps Reserves in 1989 after which turned an officer upon his commencement in 1994 from the College of Arizona.
He graduated in 2002 from William and Mary Legislation college, which means he was a scholar on the time of the Sept. 11 assaults.
Colonel Keane’s biography reveals no expertise as a protection lawyer however cites 4 completely different cases when he served as a Marine prosecutor, together with throughout his legislation college summers on the Marine bases in Quantico, Va., and Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Considered one of his finest identified circumstances concerned the tried prosecution in 2005 of a second lieutenant within the killing of two Iraqis close to Mahmudiya. A serious on the time, he was the lead prosecutor in a weeklong, excessive profile fact-finding listening to referred to as an Article 32, after which the commanding common of the Second Marine division selected to not go ahead with a full court-martial.
That is Colonel Keane’s second time as a Marine Corps choose. He did a three-year stint beginning in 2009 as a serious.