"Army Seeking Death Penalty in Massacre of 16 Afghans"

From the New York Times:

Prosecutors at a week of pretrial hearings in early November at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where Sergeant Bales was stationed, suggested that he had acted in deliberate fury, perhaps in revenge for a bomb attack that had caused a fellow soldier to lose a leg. Defense lawyers said evidence presented in the hearing about Sergeant Bales’s use of alcohol, steroids and sleeping aids complicated the picture of his mental state.

. . .

“The Army is trying to take the focus off the failures of the Army, which are substantial,” Mr. Browne said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He said that Sergeant Bales, who has pleaded not guilty, had post-traumatic stress and a concussive head injury, but that the Army sent him anyway “to one of the more intense battlegrounds of Afghanistan, on his fourth deployment.”