Lawyer keeps license despite lying to Army

[unhappycamper]

Lawyer keeps license despite lying to Army
By Jon Gambrell - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday May 19, 2008 15:43:32 EDT

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A trail of blood led from Calon E. Blackburn Jr.’s bedroom, through his home and out into the streets of the Qatar compound where he lived.

Outside, he lay on his back with a deep wound to his thigh, which he failed to stanch with an improvised tourniquet. Slashed knife wounds rendered his right hand almost useless.

As Qatari police and paramedics arrived, the longtime civilian attorney for the U.S. Army said a burglar had attacked him, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Lying there on the ground, fearing I might die, I told a whopper,” Blackburn later remembered.

Blackburn said he lied to keep a friend out of a Middle Eastern prison, but prosecutors say there was no noble intent. An Army investigation said Blackburn’s friend was a married Thai woman he kept as a lover and used as a maid; she apparently stabbed him when he tried to end their affair and he lied to avoid a possible court-martial.

“Mr. Blackburn nearly created an international incident by conspiring with (his maid) to make false statements in order to cover up an adulterous romance, a capital crime under Qatari law,” Maj. Patrick N. Leduc wrote in a report about the incident. “Any police force would have taken that (alleged attack) very seriously, especially given the sensitive nature of our important presence in the strategic Middle Eastern nation.”


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/05/ap_liestoarmy_051908/