On 15 September 2011, a wounded Taliban insurgent was shot by a Marine, Al Blackman. That much is undisputed: later, at a court martial in 2013, Blackman would argue that he shot the man when he believed him already to be dead, but this was not credited and he was found guilty of murder, dismissed from the marines and sentenced to life imprisonment, to serve a minimum of 10 years. In 2017, he was released from prison, having successfully argued on appeal that a mental health condition known as an “adjustment disorder” had significantly impaired his rational decision making.
Blackman was the first British soldier to be convicted of a battlefield murder on foreign soil since the second world war. And in the Channel 4 documentary War and Justice: The Case of Marine A, one prosecuting lawyer still takes the view that “it was a murder, by an armed soldier, of somebody who was injured, who’d been dragged down in front of him, and was shot in cold blood”. Yet this story of his trial and eventual (partial) exoneration, directed by Stephen Bennett, told through the footage and testimony of anthropologist and film-maker Chris Terrill – who was embedded in Blackman’s unit – doesn’t even leave you with enough solid ground to know exactly what you think about murder.
