Camp Pendleton Marine Pleads Guilty

By Alison St John / Reporter, KPBS Public Broadcasting

Published February 13, 2007 at 1:22 PM PST

This story was published more than 17 years ago.

A 6th Camp Pendleton Marine has entered a plea deal at his court martial for allegedly killing an Iraqi man in Hamdania last year. Lance Corporal Robert Pennington has pled guilty to two of five charg

A 6th Camp Pendleton Marine has entered a plea deal at his court martial for allegedly killing an Iraqi man in Hamdania last year. Lance Corporal Robert Pennington has pled guilty to two of five charges against him. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

Lance Corporal Robert Pennington has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping. But he has pled not guilty to the charges of housebreaking, larceny or premeditated murder.

Pennington admits he voluntarily agreed to carry out a plot conceived by the squad to capture and kill a well known insurgent. When they couldn't find the man, they went to a nearby house, and captured another man. Pennington, who had picked up a little Arabic, spoke to the man and told him he was to be taken to Abu Graib prison and returned home in the morning. Instead he testified, the squad took the man to a hole, dug to make it look as if he were planting a bomb.

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Pennington helped restrain the man. However when the squad stepped back and opened fire, Pennington, who was the radio operator, was standing behind the rest of the squad and did not shoot his weapon. Four other defendants in the case are now serving prison terms of less than two years. From Camp Pendleton, Alison St John, KPBS news.

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.