New trial request denied for convicted LI soldier

A military judge in North Carolina has rejected a request for a new trial by a Rocky Point soldier convicted last October of choking a fellow soldier to death.

An attorney for Pvt. Justin Boyle had asked the judge to declare a mistrial during a post-trial hearing at Fort Bragg last Thursday, saying the composition of the jury and actions they took denied Boyle a fair trial.

Supporters of Boyle, who had served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, have maintained the choking death near an off-base bar was an accident, and that Boyle was only following a Fort Bragg directive not to leave behind a fellow soldier.

"I'm devastated and I'm frustrated," said Boyle's mother, Fran Boyle, of Rocky Point. "This is not just about my son, this is about soldiers not having the same rights as other citizens."

In seeking a new trial, Boyle's lawyer offered the testimony of one of the witnesses in the court martial. The witness told the judge that after the trial one of the jurors told him other jurors had harbored an agenda against Boyle.

Boyle's lawyer, Daniel Conway, also told the judge that one of the prosecutors was the legal adviser to five of the nine jurors, undermining their impartiality.

"If I had a jury comprised of 55 percent of my clients and former clients, I'd say those would be pretty good odds," Conway told Newsday. "The conflict and appearance of conflict in this case simply goes too far to consider the proceedings impartial."

The judge issued a written ruling Tuesday, saying there was no clear evidence that the one juror had accused other jurors of impropriety.

He also said that concerns regarding the jury's composition "were (or should have been) addressed at trial and are not the proper subject" of the post-trial hearing.

Boyle's challenge of his conviction again raised questions over whether the Uniform Code of Military Justice gives a unit's commander too much potential influence over the outcome of a court martial.

Under the UCMJ, a unit's commander decides whether to bring charges against a subordinate, and also picks the prosecutor and the juror pool from within his command. Convictions do not have to be unanimous as in civilian trials: they prevail with a two-thirds majority.

But challenges to how military trials proceed have been mostly rejected since Congress adopted the UCMJ in 1950, said Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale University.

"The question is what I call a hearty perennial in military circles," Fidell said. "There is a major discrepancy between military and civilian law."

Boyle was one of several soldiers accused of accidentally killing Pfc. Luke Brown, of Fredericksburg, Va., following a night of drinking at a local bar in July 2008. The soldiers said they had only tried to subdue Brown, who testimony at the trial showed was drunk and had fought off soldiers trying to get him back to the barracks.