© Polaris / Eyevine
On trial: Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, accused of killing three unarmed Afghan civilians, walks through a field on his way into a village in Kandahar province
On trial: Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, accused of killing three unarmed Afghan civilians, walks through a field on his way into a village in Kandahar province
Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, of Billings, Montanta, was accused of exhorting his bored underlings to slaughter three Afghan civilians for sport.
The jury for the court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle sentenced Gibbs Thursday to life in prison, but he will be eligible for parole in less than nine years.
The 26-year-old soldier was the highest ranking of five soldiers charged in the deaths of the unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province early last year.
At his seven-day court martial, he acknowledged cutting fingers off corpses and yanking out a victim's tooth to keep as war trophies, "like keeping the antlers off a deer you'd shoot." But he insisted he wasn't involved in the first or third killings, and in the second he merely returned fire.
Prosecutors said Gibbs and his co-defendants knew the victims posed no danger but dropped weapons by their dead bodies to make them appear to have been combatants.
