The Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base in Killeen, Tex., won a temporary delay of his trial on Wednesday, after a military appeals court halted the proceedings to allow it time to rule on whether the judge in his case can order him to be forcibly shaved.
The psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, grew a beard in recent months, an expression, his defense lawyers said, of his Muslim faith. Beards violate Army regulations, and Fort Hood’s chief circuit judge, Col. Gregory Gross, has forbidden Major Hasan to sit in the courtroom during several pretrial hearings at Fort Hood as a result.
Colonel Gross has allowed the major to watch via a closed-circuit television feed in a trailer near the courthouse.
The judge has repeatedly fined Major Hasan and held him in contempt over his beard, stating that his appearance was a disruption and that he would have him forcibly shaved unless he complied. But his lawyers asked the highest military appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, to prevent the shaving and issue a stay.
On Wednesday, the court granted the stay, halting all hearings until further notice.
The order abruptly ended a pretrial hearing at Fort Hood on Wednesday. It was the latest in a series of delays that have pushed back the start of the trial, which was to begin Monday.
Last July, Major Hasan released his civilian lawyer, and his new defense team, from the Army Trial Defense Service, was granted a request to delay the trial to March. The trial date was later pushed back to June and then to this month, to allow the defense time to prepare. At a hearing Tuesday, the judge denied a defense request to delay the trial once again until October.
Major Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the November 2009 attack, which was one of the deadliest mass shootings at an American military base. He faces the death penalty if convicted.
Major Hasan first appeared with the beard at a hearing on June 8. Until then, he had been clean-shaven during his court appearances, and prosecutors have argued that Major Hasan, an American-born Muslim, grew a beard to prevent witnesses from identifying him at his trial.
In June, a lower appeals court, the United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals, denied the defense’s request to bar Colonel Gross from removing Major Hasan from the courtroom. In addition, Major Hasan’s lawyers asked Army officials to grant a religious exemption from the facial-hair regulations, but that request was denied.
Defense lawyers have sparred with Colonel Gross over his handling of the beard issue and others, and they have tried, without success, to get him to recuse himself, claiming he is biased.
But experts in military law said they supported Colonel Gross in requiring Major Hasan to abide by Army regulations. Years after the shooting, he remains a major in the Army and is presumed innocent until found guilty, and therefore should be held to the same Army standards as other soldiers, they said.
“Soldiers don’t get to make individual decisions on uniform standards based on their religious beliefs,” said Geoffrey Corn, a former Army prosecutor and defense lawyer who is now a professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. “They sacrifice that individual autonomy when they choose to become soldiers. I don’t think it matters what his motivation for wanting to wear a beard is. He is a soldier, there’s a standard, and he’s not complying with it.”
How the beard issue is handled has serious legal implications. If Major Hasan is allowed to keep the beard but watch the proceedings from outside the courthouse during his trial, he could appeal a conviction by arguing that his Sixth Amendment rights, which grant the accused the right to be “confronted with the witnesses against him,” were violated.
John P. Galligan, the lawyer whom Major Hasan released last year, said he was pleased by the appeals court’s order. “Finally somebody stepped in and said, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ ” he said. “A forcible shave would be inappropriate and almost illegal in the context of this death penalty case.”