United States v. Harman

Sabrina D. Harman (defendant), an army reservist assigned as a guard at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was convicted of several offenses including dereliction of duty in violation of Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) due to her willful failure protect detainees from abuse, cruelty, and maltreatment. The conviction arose from two incidents that occurred in November 2003. On November 4, a detainee was forced to stand for an hour on a box with an empty sandbag covering his head. Harman attached wires to the detainee’s hands and told him that he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box. On November 7, Harman took photos as other guards forced a group of hooded, handcuffed detainees to sit or lie in a pile on the floor and physically assaulted them. The detainees were then stripped, and Harman wrote “I’m a rapeist (sic)” on the naked thigh of one detainee. The naked detainees were then forced to form a human pyramid. Harman posed for a photo in which she stood next to the pyramid, smiling and giving the thumbs-up symbol. Prior to the November incidents, Harman, on one occasion, removed the handcuffs from a prisoner who had been handcuffed for multiple hours by another guard and reported the incident to the appropriate authority. On another occasion, Harman wrote a letter to her former roommate expressing concern about mistreatment of prisoners she had witnessed. The convening authority approved Harman’s conviction, and her case was forwarded to the United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals for review pursuant to Article 66 of the UCMJ. On appeal, Harman argued that the evidence was insufficient to sustain her conviction because it did not show that she knew or reasonably should have known of her duty to protect the detainees. In support of this argument, Harman asserted that she was not adequately trained as a prison guard or educated in the law of armed conflict. Harman also argued that she was not derelict in her duty because she had been working to expose the abuse by documenting it in photographs.