bloody

A British soldier charged with murder over the Bloody Sunday massacre has been acquitted by a Belfast court, in a verdict condemned by victims’ relatives and Northern Ireland’s political leader.

The former British paratrooper, known as Soldier F under a court anonymity order, was accused of murdering James Wray and William McKinney and attempting to murder five others when soldiers opened fire on unarmed Catholic civil rights marchers in Derry more than 50 years ago.

Belfast Crown Court was silent on Thursday as Judge Patrick Lynch read the verdict acquitting Soldier F of two charges of murder and five of attempted murder. Soldier F listened to the verdict from behind a thick blue curtain, hidden from view in the packed courtroom.

On January 30, 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed civil rights protesters as more than 10,000 people marched in Derry. British soldiers shot at least 26 unarmed civilians. Thirteen people were killed, while another man died from his injuries four months later.

The massacre became a pivotal moment in the Troubles, helping to fuel nearly three decades of violence between Irish nationalists seeking civil rights and a united Ireland, pro-British unionists wanting Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, and the British Army. A 1998 peace deal largely ended the bloodshed.

Lynch said in his verdict that he was satisfied that soldiers had lost all sense of military discipline and opened fire with intent to kill and that “those responsible should hang their heads in shame”.

But he said the case fell short of the burden of proof.

“Delay has, in my view, seriously hampered the capacity of the defence to test the veracity and accuracy of the hearsay statements,” he said.

An initial investigation into the massacre — the Widgery Tribunal, an investigation held in 1972 — largely cleared the soldiers and British authorities of responsibility.

A second investigation, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, also known as the Saville Inquiry, found in June 2010 that there had been no justification for any of the shootings and found that paratroopers had fired at fleeing unarmed civilians.

Following the Saville Inquiry, police in Northern Ireland launched a murder investigation, with prosecutors finding that one former soldier would face trial for two murders and five attempted murders.

Prosecutors have previously ruled there was insufficient evidence to charge 16 other former British soldiers.

Soldier F was not called to give evidence during the one-month trial that was heard without a jury. He had previously told investigators he no longer had a reliable recollection of the massacre.

Mickey McKinney, brother of William McKinney, one of the two victims named in the case, denounced the verdict outside the courtroom on Thursday.

“Soldier F has been discharged from the defendant’s criminal dock, but it is one million miles away from being an honourable discharge,” McKinney said. “Soldier F created two young widows on Bloody Sunday, he orphaned 12 children, and he deprived dozens of siblings of a loving brother,”

McKinney said he “firmly” blamed the British government for the trial’s outcome.

“The blame lies firmly with the British state, with the RUC [the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Northern Irish police], who failed to investigate the murders on Bloody Sunday properly, or indeed at all,” McKinney said.

Following Thursday’s verdict, a spokesperson for the UK government said the UK is “committed to finding a way forward that acknowledges the past, whilst supporting those who served their country during an incredibly difficult period in Northern Ireland’s history”.

Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill, who is vice president of the Sinn Fein pro-Irish unity party, called the verdict “deeply disappointing”.

“The continued denial of justice for the Bloody Sunday families is deeply disappointing,” she wrote on X. “Not one British soldier or their military and political superiors has ever been held to account. That is an affront to justice.”

California’s fight to rein in President Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles hinges on a 19th century law with a a blood-soaked origin and a name that seems pulled from a Spaghetti Western.

In a pivotal ruling this week, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ordered the federal government to hand over evidence to state authorities seeking to prove that the actions of troops in Southern California violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids soldiers from enforcing civilian laws.

“How President Trump has used and is using the federalized National Guard and the Marines since deploying them at the beginning of June is plainly relevant to the Posse Comitatus Act,” Breyer wrote Wednesday in his order authorizing “limited expedited discovery.”

The Trump administration objected to the move and has already once gotten a sweeping Breyer ruling that would’ve limited White House authority over the troops overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

This time, the Northern District of California judge made clear he would “only allow discovery as to the Posse Comitatus Act” — signaling what could be the state’s last stand battle to prevent Marines and National Guard forces from participating in immigration enforcement.

The Posse Comitatus Act dates back to the aftermath of the Civil War when the American government faced violent resistance to its efforts to rebuild Southern state governments and enforce federal law following the abolition of slavery.

The text of the law itself is slight, its relevant section barely more than 60 words. Yet when it was enacted, it served as the legal epitaph to Reconstruction — and a preface to Jim Crow.

“It has these very ignoble beginnings,” said Mark P. Nevitt, a law professor at Emory University and one of the country’s foremost experts on the statute.

Before the Civil War, the U.S. military was kept small, in part to avoid the kinds of abuses American colonists suffered under the British.

Authorities back then could marshal a crew of civilians, called a posse comitatus, to assist them, as sometimes happened in California during the Gold Rush. States also had militias that could be called up by the president to pad out the army in wartime.

But law enforcement by the U.S. military was rare and deeply unpopular. Historians have said the use of soldiers to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — which saw escaped slaves hunted down and returned to the South — helped spark the Civil War.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has used constitutional maneuvers invented to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act to justify using troops to round up immigrants. Experts said leaders from the antebellum South demanded similar enforcement of the law.

“The South was all for posse comitatus when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act,” said Josh Dubbert, a historian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Ohio.

But by the time Congress sent federal troops to begin Reconstruction in earnest in 1867, the landscape was very different.

After white rioters razed Black neighborhoods in Memphis and mobs of ex-Confederate soldiers massacred Black demonstrators in New Orleans in the spring of 1866, “most of the South [was] turned into military districts,” said Jacob Calhoun, a professor of American history at Wabash College and an expert on Reconstruction.

“Most scholars, let alone the American public, do not understand the scale of racial violence during Reconstruction,” Calhoun said. “They only send these troops in after unimaginable levels of violence.”

At the polls, Black voters were met by white gangs seeking to prevent them from casting ballots.

“For most of American history, the idea of an American army intervening in elections is a nightmare,” Calhoun said. “[Posse Comitatus] is reemphasizing this longstanding belief but for more nefarious purposes.”

The Posse Comitatus language was tucked into an appropriations bill by Southern Democrats after their party won control of Congress in the election of 1876 — “possibly the most violent election in American history_,” Calhoun said.

Historians say white lawmakers in the post-war South sought to enshrine their ability to keep Black men from voting by barring federal forces from bolstering the local militias that protected them.

“Once they’re in control of Congress, they want to cut the appropriations for the army,” Dubbert said. “They attach this amendment to [their appropriations bill] which is the Posse Comitatus Act.”

The bill won support from some Republicans, who resented the use of federalized troops to put down the Railroad Strike of 1877 — the first national labor strike in the U.S.

“It is a moment in which white Northern congressmen surrender the South back to ex-Confederates,” Calhoun said. “With the Posse Comitatus Act, racial violence becomes the norm.”

Yet the statute itself largely vanished from memory, little used for most of the next century.

“The Posse Comitatus Act was forgotten for about 75 years, from after Reconstruction to basically the 1950s, when a defense lawyer made a challenge to a piece of evidence that the Army had obtained,” Nevitt said. “The case law is [all] after World War II.”

Those cases have largely turned on troops who arrest, search, seize or detain civilians — “the normal thing the LAPD does on a daily basis,” Nevitt said. The courts have stood by the bedrock principle that military personnel should not be used to enforce the law against civilians, he said, except in times of rebellion or other extreme scenarios.

“Our nation was forged in large part because the British military was violating the civil rights of colonists in New England,” Nevitt said. “I really can’t think of a more important question than the military’s ability to use force against Americans.”

Yet, the law is full of loopholes, scholars said — notably in relation to use of the National Guard.

Department of Justice has argued Posse Comitatus does not apply to the military’s current actions in Southern California — and even if it did, the soldiers deployed there haven’t violated the law. It also claimed the 9th Circuit decision endorsing Trump’s authority to call up troops rendered the Posse Comitatus issue moot.

Some experts feel California’s case is strong.

“You literally have military roaming the streets of Los Angeles with civilian law enforcement,” said Shilpi Agarwal, legal director of the ACLU of Northern California, “That’s exactly what the [act] is designed to prevent.”

But Nevitt was more doubtful. Even if Breyer ultimately rules that Trump’s troops are violating the law and grants the injunction California is seeking, the 9th Circuit will almost certainly strike it down, he said.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle,” the attorney said. “And if they find a way to get to the Supreme Court, I see the Supreme Court siding with Trump as well.”