Sergeant Paul Cortez was sentenced to 100 years in prison for his role in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the slaying of her family.
FORT CAMPBELL: A US soldier was sentenced on Thursday to 100 years in prison for his role in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the slaying of her family.
Sergeant Paul Cortez, 24, said he was among five soldiers who plotted the March 2006 rape and murders in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, while they were drinking gin and whiskey and playing cards at a traffic checkpoint.
Cortez was in tears as members of his 101st Airborne Division unit testified on his behalf ahead of sentencing Thursday. "I'm sorry I let you guys down; you guys treat me better than this," he said.
Cortez was the second soldier to plead guilty in the high-profile case, one in a series of incidents which have tarnished the reputation of US forces in Iraq.
The military judge in the court-martial here first sentenced him Thursday to life in prison without parole, as well as a dishonorable discharge.
But the judge then acknowledged that, under a plea bargain overseen by the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division, Cortez could only be sentenced to 100 years' imprisonment, which under military law allows for the possibility of parole after 10 years.
The case shocked many with accounts that the soldiers calmly plotted to rape a young girl they had seen walking down the street in the Iraqi village and deliberately tried cover up their crime by killing her family and setting the family's house on fire.
They decided Abeer Kassem Hamza al-Janabi would make a good target for the plan to "have sex with an Iraqi female," because her father was the only man in the house, Cortez told a military court.
In a statement frequently interrupted by tears, Cortez described how a fellow soldier pinned the girl to the ground and held her down while he raped her.
"She kept screaming and tried to keep her legs closed," he told the court. "At no point did I think that I had consent to have sex with Abeer."
When he was finished with her, Cortez held Janabi down as specialist James Barker raped her.
Barker also avoided the death penalty as part of a plea deal last November in which he was sentenced to 90 years in prison and agreed to cooperate with the prosecutions of the other soldiers.
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