By Joe Lauria / Consortium News
A sentencing hearing has concluded in the case of Australian whistleblower David McBride who was forced to plead guilty to leaking classified documents to the media after he was essentially denied a defense at his trial in November. The documents ultimately revealed evidence of war crimes committed by the Australian Defence Force.
Justice David Mossop will pronounce the sentence next Tuesday. The government has demanded more than two years in prison, while the judge could impose as little as house arrest, monitoring , and counseling outside prison for up to four years.
McBride, a former military lawyer, was charged with stealing government documents and giving them to journalists at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which revealed covered-up murders of unarmed civilians by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. A four-year government inquiry later found 23 possible war crimes, including the murder of 39 Afghans.
McBride’s defense had rested on the court accepting his argument that his oath to the British crown gave him a duty beyond obedience to military orders to instead inform the entire nation of government wrongdoing.
But Justice Mossop refused that defense. “There is no aspect of duty that allows the accused to act in the public interest contrary to a lawful order,” he told the court in November.
McBride’s legal team tried to appeal that decision, but its application was denied by Supreme Court Chief Justice Lucy McCallum. On the same day in November Mossop ordered that agents of the Attorney General’s office could remove classified documents from the defense’s possession, which McBride’s team had intended to present to the jury.
Because of those regressive rulings, McBride accepted his attorneys’ advice that, left with no viable defense, he should plead guilty.
In arguing for a lengthy prison sentence, the government prosecutor said on Monday that McBride was motivated by arrogance and a sense of personal vindication rather than the public interest.
“Anything less would fall outside the appropriate range [of punishment],” the prosecutor, Trish MacDonald, said. “A period of imprisonment of two years doesn’t reflect the seriousness of the offending.”
Stephen Odgers, McBride’s chief attorney. told the court that McBride was a man of high character who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, self-medicated with alcohol, and believed he was doing the right thing. Odgers presented 13 character references.
But the prosecutor said McBride’s guilty plea to stealing government documents undermined his claims of honesty. “There’s no evidence, your honour, of contrition or remorse,” she said.
Sentencing will be handed down on May 14.
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Joe Lauria
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe