More About My Lai

Will the agonizing aftermath of My Lai never end? Last week the court-martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina, Lieut. William Galley's superior officer, pressed painfully on. It seemed less and less likely that anyone would ever know for sure who was responsible for what on the bloody day of March 16, 1968.

The pace and tenor of the Medina court-martial at Fort McPherson, Ga., was in sharp contrast to Calley's trial. In the latter case, the coldly efficient Army prosecutor, Captain Aubrey M. Daniel, was easily able to destroy the bumbling defense put forward by Calley's aging civilian counsel, George W. Latimer. Medina's chief prosecutor was Major William G. Eckhardt, who went into the trial with the record of having unsuccessfully prosecuted two previous Viet Nam atrocity cases. The captain's lawyer, moreover, was the flamboyant Boston attorney F. Lee Bailey, with his vast repertory of legal tricks.

Favorable Testimony. In a typical maneuver, Bailey last week managed to draw testimony from a key prosecution witness that was overwhelmingly favorable to the defense. The witness was Gene Oliver, a cocky former private in Charlie Company, who came forward to state that it was he, and not Medina, who had shot and killed a small boy on the day of the massacre. Medina had been formally accused of killing the boy and an older woman, in addition to being responsible for at least 100 civilians slain near the hamlet.

Oliver was a witness tailor-made for Bailey's dramatic methods. On the stand, he startled the prosecution by declaring: "This whole proceeding is completely unfair. [The prosecution] knows he is innocent as well as I do." Bailey introduced as testimony part of a lie-detector test, which indicated that Oliver had told the truth about the boy's killing. When Eckhardt showed that the same test also indicated that Oliver harbored feelings of "tremendous hostility" toward the prosecution, a violent shouting match ensued between Eckhardt and Bailey in which Eckhardt accused Oliver of deliberately trying to obstruct the prosecution's case. When Oliver arrived at Fort McPherson, he gleefully told an Army driver: "I'm going to blow this case wide open." In part, he did. Colonel Kenneth Howard, the presiding officer, dropped the charge of killing the boy.

Army Argot. Medina aided his own cause when Bailey finally put him on the witness stand on the 16th day of the trial. Confident and jaunty, talking in Army argot ("40 mike mikies," "four deuces," "BMNT") for the benefit of the five battle-tested jurors, Medina denied that he had been on the scene of the massacre. He also denied that he had told his men, as Galley had claimed during his own court-martial, to kill everything, including women and children; he said he had merely told them to "use common sense." Medina admitted to killing the woman in the paddyfield, but claimed that he fired instinctively when he saw her move.

By week's end Bailey seemed to have maneuvered Medina into a sound strategic position. Colonel Howard ruled that Medina could not be found guilty of premeditated murder in the deaths of the 100 civilians because of insufficient evidence. If the jury accepts Medina's testimony about the woman, the worst judgment that could be rendered against him is one of involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum penalty of three years' hard labor. It is doubtful that Medina will draw a sentence anywhere near as heavy as "Rusty" Calley's (20 years' imprisonment pending appeals). Calley showed up long enough at Fort McPherson last week to say that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if called to the stand--which is just what Bailey wanted him to do.

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