Army Col. Jeffery Nance, the judge in the case of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, said this week that Bergdahl does bear some responsibility for the dangerous search missions that were launched in the wake of his 2009 disappearance. Nance's language, however, seemed to indicate that Army prosecutors may have a limited scope in which incidents they will get to pin on Bergdahl during his upcoming court-martial.
"Sgt. Bergdahl is not responsible for a never-ending chain of events... But he is responsible for a certain amount of that chain of events," Nance said in court this week, as WRAL.com reports. He went on further to say that prosecutors "have got to be able to put on some evidence of endangerment, and the question for me is how far on the spectrum they should be able to go."
Nance's words come after the court's examination of two incidents of soldier injury that occurred during the search for Bergdahl—one of which resulted in a catastrophic brain injury. The argument that Bergdahl's decision to unexpectedly abandon his Afghanistan outpost led to significant causalities is a hot-button issue in the case against him. Prosecutors, however, will not present incidents of injury beyond the two presented accounts.
"ALL THE INTERVENING CAUSES"
Bergdahl's defense team continues to insist that Bergdahl shouldn't be held accountable for the actions of Taliban forces that clashed with U.S. Soldiers following his disappearance and capture. Army Maj. Oren Gleich, one of Bergdahl's attorneys, even went so far to assert that the mission that involved the two injured soldiers was hastily planned.
"You have to factor in all the intervening causes as to what created a dangerous situation," Gleich said. Nance has yet to decide how to weigh the prosecution's evidence of Soldier injury, but Bergdahl's case continues to provide a number of expected twists: since the election of Donald Trump—who used Bergdahl as a talking point on the campaign trail—Bergdahl's defense team has announced its intention to petition that the charges against him are dropped due to unprecedented public exposure and bias.
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