World Mar. 31, 2009 - 05:33AM JST ( 26 )

VILSECK, Germany —

A U.S. sergeant on Monday became on Monday the second non-commissioned officer to be convicted of murder for the summary executions of four bound and blindfolded prisoners in Iraq in 2007.

Sergeant First Class Joseph P Mayo was sentenced by a court martial in southern Germany to life in prison, but because he pleaded guilty, will serve no more than 35 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 10 years.

Mayo told a court martial that he and two other sergeants shot the prisoners in the back of the head with nine-millimeter pistols and dumped their bodies in a Baghdad canal.

“I thought it was in the best interests of my soldiers,” Mayo, 27, told the court in the town of Vilseck after pleading guilty to murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Mayo was able to escape a life sentence after a pre-trial agreement with the commander of his unit, an army spokesman said.

“I really believed I was protecting my soldiers,” Mayo repeated in a closing statement that brought him and family members including his mother, wife and 10-year-old daughter to tears.

“I take full responsibility for my actions,” he said. “Now I have to pay for my mistake.”

Mayo said the men, “of apparent Middle Eastern descent,” according to the charge sheet, had been arrested after repeated attacks on their unit, including a sniper attack that killed a friend and fellow sergeant.

The defendant himself had been almost killed by an explosive device a few months earlier, and suffered a diagnosed mild traumatic brain injury, his lawyer Michael Waddington said.

While making their arrests, the U.S. troops found two sniper rifles, AK-47 assault rifles and a duffel bag full of ammunition. But there was insufficient evidence to hold the men, Waddington told the court, and Mayo said: “I believed they would be released.”

Mayo is one seven soldiers implicated in the case and one of three non-commissioned officers to be tried for murder.

First Sergeant John E Hatley, the most senior soldier present, is to stand trial charged with murder in Germany on April 13, an army statement said last week. A spokesman said Monday that Mayo would testify in that trial.

In February, co-defendant Sergeant Michael P Leahy, an army medic, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Two other soldiers have pleaded guilty to lesser charges and been sentenced to prison terms of less than a year, an army spokeswoman said.

Charges were dismissed against two others, including Staff Sergeant Jess Cunningham, who first revealed the incident to a defense lawyer in January 2008.

Waddington told reporters after Mayo’s trial had adjourned: “Our objective is to get him out of prison as quickly as possible.”

All the soldiers were with the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, then part of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, and now in the 172nd Infantry Brigade based in Germany.

A character witness in the trial, First Lieutenant Benjamin Boyd, said the troops had been at a combat outpost dubbed “Angry Dragon” in southwest Baghdad that was on a “significant fault line” between Sunni and Shia areas of the city.

“I hold fewer people in higher regard,” Boyd said of the defendant. “I couldn’t have asked for a better platoon sergeant.”

Another witness, Capt David Nelson-Fischer said the unit suffered from “frustration and fear” because of a high frequency of attacks on Mayo’s small, highly exposed post in West Rashid, one of the most dangerous Baghdad neighborhoods at that time.

The U.S. troops were “not adequately trained”, and angry that prisoners were often released after two or three days in custody, only to carry out further attacks and armed with fresh intelligence on U.S. operating methods.

But the army’s trial counsel, Captain John Riesenberg, said Mayo had “demonstrated a total lack of moral courage,” in shooting a prisoner “execution style.”

He had urged the court martial judge, Colonel Jeffrey Nance, to deliver a sentence that would “send a message to the army and to the world.”

The U.S. Army, Riesenberg said, “is an army that punishes its own.”

Wire reports