Charles Gittins | |
|---|---|
| Nickname(s) | Charlie |
| Born | October 26, 1956 [1] Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania |
| Service/ | United States Marine Corps United States Marine Corps Reserve [2] |
| Years of service | 1979-1992 (active duty) [2] 1992-1995 (reserve) [2] |
| Rank | Lieutenant Colonel |
| Unit | United States Marine Corps Judge Advocate Division [2] |
| Battles/wars | Gulf War |
| Other work | Lawyer who specializes in military cases |
Charles William Gittins [3] (born October 26, 1956) is an American lawyer, who has worked for a number of noteworthy defendants in military courts martial. [4] [5] [6]
Gittins attended the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1979. He then joined the Marine Corps where he served as a Radar Intercept Officer. [4]
Gittins graduated first in his class from The Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law in 1987 and was in the Judge Advocate Corps for six years, before entering civilian life. [4] [7] The first civilian firm Gittins worked for was Williams & Connolly. [4] While there he defended Robert E. Stumpf, Commander of the Blue Angels, and one of the principals in the Tailhook scandal. [8] He spent three and a half years there before founding his own firm. [4]
| Lieutenant Ilario Pantano | United States Marine Corps who was cleared of shooting two unarmed Iraqi captives, then desecrating their bodies in order "to send a message". [9] |
| Specialist Charles Graner | Military Police reservist involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal. [10] |
| Major Harry "Psycho" Schmidt | Former instructor from the United States Navy's TOPGUN school who bombarded a platoon of Canadians in Afghanistan, even though he had been directed to hold his fire. [11] [12] |
| Commander Scott Waddle | Captain of the USS GREENEVILLE, during the conduct of an emergency surface maneuver, the GREENEVILLE collided with the Japanese Fishery training vessle Ehime Maru which sank in 2000 feet of water off the coast of Oahu (see Ehime Maru and USS Greeneville collision). [6] [13] |
| Captain Christopher M. Beiring | Commanded the troops at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which beat two Afghani captives to death with "compliance blows". [14] [15] |
| Captain Randy W. Stone | Stone was a Marine Judge Advocate officer against whom charges were recommended for failing to formally investigate the Haditha incident where a squad of Marines methodically shot and killed two dozen nearby civilian families after a well-liked comrade was killed by a roadside bomb. [16] |
Charles A. Graner Jr. is an American former soldier who was court-martialed for prisoner abuse after the 2003–2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Along with other soldiers of his Army Reserve unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, Graner was accused of allowing and inflicting sexual, physical, and psychological abuse on Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious prison in Baghdad during the United States' occupation of Iraq.
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is a Tanzanian conspirator of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization convicted for his role in the bombing of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was indicted in the United States as a participant in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. He was on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list from its inception in October 2001. In 2004, he was captured and detained by Pakistani forces in a joint operation with the United States, and was held until June 9, 2009, at Guantanamo Bay detention camp; one of 14 Guantanamo detainees who had previously been held at secret locations abroad. According to The Washington Post, Ghailani told military officers he is contrite and claimed to be an exploited victim of al-Qaeda operatives.
Ilario Gregory Pantano is a former United States Marine Corps second lieutenant. He has also been an author, a television commentator, and served as a Deputy Sheriff in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was a Republican Party nominee for the US House of Representatives in 2010.
The Tailhook scandal was a military scandal in which United States (U.S.) Navy and U.S. Marine Corps aviation officers were alleged to have sexually assaulted up to 83 women and seven men, or otherwise engaged in "improper and indecent" conduct at the Las Vegas Hilton in Las Vegas, Nevada. The events took place at the 35th Annual Tailhook Association Symposium from September 5 to 8, 1991. The event was subsequently abbreviated as "Tailhook '91" in media accounts.
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Abdul Zahir (عبدالظاهر) is a citizen of Afghanistan currently held in extrajudicial detention in the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He was the tenth captive, and the first Afghan, to face charges before the first Presidentially authorized Guantanamo military commissions. After the Supreme Court ruled that the President lacked the constitutional authority to set up military commissions, the United States Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he was not charged under that system.
Charles D. Swift is an American attorney and former career Navy officer, who retired in 2007 as a Lieutenant Commander in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. He is most noted for having served as defense counsel for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a detainee from Yemen who was the first to be charged at Guantanamo Bay; Swift took his case to the US Supreme Court. In 2005 and June 2006, the National Law Journal recognized Swift as one of the top lawyers nationally because of his work on behalf of justice for the detainees.
The Haditha massacre was a series of killings on November 19, 2005, in which a group of United States Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. The killings occurred in Haditha, a city in Iraq's western province of Al Anbar. Among the dead were men, women, elderly people and children as young as 1, who were shot multiple times at close range while unarmed. The ensuing massacre took place after an improvised explosive device exploded near a convoy, killing a lance corporal and severely injuring two other marines. The immediate reaction was to seize 5 men in a nearby taxi and execute them on the street.
Appleby is a leading offshore legal services provider.
Lawrence Eric Taylor is an American attorney and author. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA School of Law, Taylor was a public defender and criminal prosecutor in Los Angeles County before entering private practice. He currently heads a law firm in California that limits its practice to drunk driving defense. Both Taylor and his law firm are ranked "A-V" by the Martindale-Hubbell International Law Directory. Taylor and his law firm have also been recognized by Super Lawyers magazine for the years 2004 through 2012 as being among the top 5 percent of DUI defense attorneys.
On 9 February 2001, about nine nautical miles south of Oahu, Hawaii, in the Pacific Ocean, the United States Navy (USN) Los Angeles-class submarine USS Greeneville (SSN-772) collided with the Japanese fishery high-school training ship Ehime Maru (えひめ丸) from Ehime Prefecture. In a demonstration for some VIP civilian visitors, Greeneville performed an emergency ballast blow surfacing maneuver. As the submarine shot to the surface, it struck Ehime Maru. Within ten minutes of the collision, Ehime Maru sank. Nine of the thirty-five people aboard were killed: four high school students, two teachers, and three crew members.
Colby Vokey is an American lawyer and former officer in the United States Marine Corps. He currently practices criminal defense law in his own private practice. He represents clients in all types of criminal matters, with particular emphasis on cases involving military law. Vokey earned the rank of lieutenant colonel and served as a judge advocate in the United States Marine Corps during 21 years of service to his country. His retirement from the Marine Corps became effective Nov. 1, 2008. During his military career, Vokey earned worldwide praise for his work ethic and integrity, based in part on his work for defendants detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who faced charges stemming from the war in Iraq.
Sergeant Jose Luis Nazario Jr. is the first American to be tried in a civilian court for war crimes which were allegedly committed while he was on active duty. Nazario was charged, under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, with voluntary manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence for his role in the death of four unarmed Iraqis. The Iraqis were killed on November 9, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq, when Nazario was leading a squad of 13 Marines on house to house searches as part of Operation Phantom Fury, during the Second Battle of Fallujah.
Charles Hernan Carreon is an American trial attorney best known for his involvement in a legal dispute between The Oatmeal webcomic and content aggregator FunnyJunk. As of 2012, he represented individuals and companies in matters pertaining to Internet law.
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Jeffrey Colwell is an American lawyer, and retired colonel in the United States Marine Corps. Colwell served in the Marine Corps from his graduation from the United States Naval Academy in 1987 until his retirement in 2012. The Marine Corps sponsored Colwell to earn a J.D. degree at Suffolk University. After his retirement, he moved with his wife and two children to Denver, Colorado to become a court clerk.
Colonel John Bogdan is an officer in the United States Army and former commander of the Guantanamo prison camp. He also ran detention centers in Iraq and Somalia. In 2018 Bogdan was hired by UNC Charlotte as its Associate Vice Chancellor of Safety and Security.
Colonel Donnie Thomas was the commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo's Joint Detention Group from February 2010 to June 2012.
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Donald Joseph Guter is an American educator, lawyer and former United States Navy rear admiral who was the 10th president and dean of South Texas College of Law Houston from 2009 to 2019. He previously served as the 10th dean of the Duquesne University School of Law from 2005 to 2008, when he was dismissed by Duquesne University president Charles J. Dougherty over a tenure battle.
His most famous case involved Cmdr. Scott Waddle, commanding officer of the submarine Greeneville, which hit a Japanese training vessel in February 2001.
Waddle's attorney Charles Gittins, who has represented clients in several high-profile military cases, said Sunday that the collision was caused by a 'chain of mistakes' in the sub's control room that left his client unaware of the dangerous proximity of the trawler.
He was honored by the service with an invitation to go to law school at the expense of the Government. He graduated first in his class at Catholic University in May 1987.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)Both Gittins and Beck say the responsibility for the friendly fire incident lies further up in the chain of command.
Yesterday, his attorney, Charles Gittins, said Waddle would not testify because he had not been granted testimonial immunity by Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
In one of the prosecutors' most important tests, the Army last month abandoned its case against Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, the former military police commander at Bagram and one of the few American officers since 9/11 to face criminal charges related to the abuse of detainees by the officers' subordinates.
Ultimately, the army's Criminal Investigations Command recommended charges against 28 soldiers, implicating them in the deaths of two detainees. (One was Dilawar; the other was Mullah Habibullah, who died on December 4, 2002 after similar treatment.) As of September 2004, twelve GIs had actually been charged, including the commander of the 377th, Captain Christopher M. Beiring.
Stone's lawyer, Charles Gittins, says the Marines are trying to make his client a scapegoat.