On January 23, 2021, Chief Petty Officer Tony DeDolph of the U.S. Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) was sentenced to ten years in prison for the involuntary manslaughter of Staff Sergeant Logan Melgar of the U.S. Army Green Berets. DeDolph, “pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit assault, involuntary manslaughter, hazing, and obstruction of justice,” while also forfeiting pay, being reduced in rank to an E-1, and being given a dishonorable discharge.
While the incident was rather well-reported by the media, there was a little public outcry and, still, outside of military circles, the incident remains largely unknown and rather forgotten. However, the event showcased the immense problems within the SEAL community and the hurdles that DeDolph’s involuntary manslaughter conviction poses towards legitimate reform of the U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare elements.
In June of 2017, following a series of incidents involving alcohol and “frat-like” behavior, two U.S. Navy SEALS, Petty Officer 1st Class Anthony DeDolph and Chief Petty Officer Adam Matthews, and two Marine Corps Special Operations (MARSOC) operators, Gunnery Sergeant Mario Madera-Rodriguez, and Staff Sergeant Kevin Maxwell, viciously murdered Staff Sergeant Logan Melgar, a U.S. Army Green Beret, in a hazing incident. The hazing involved breaking into Melgar’s room with a sledgehammer, pinning him down and rendering him unconscious, before tying him up and hiring a local Malian guard to lie down next to Melgar while a British man would record the action. The following investigation found that the soldiers repeatedly covered up their actions, made conflicting statements to investigators, and lied about Melgar’s drinking prior to the incident, this eventually resulting in charges of felony murder and obstruction of justice among others being brought in November of 2018. Despite the investigation being ongoing, DeDolph was promoted from Petty Officer 1st Class to Chief Petty Officer only two months after Melgar’s death.
Eventually, the service members began pleading out their cases, with Matthews pleading “guilty to charges that he conspired to commit an assault and battery, unlawful entry and obstructed justice by lying to investigators about who was involved in Melgar’s death” and was sentenced to a year’s confinement in the brig, demoted to the rank of Petty Officer 2nd Class, and given a “bad conduct discharge,” and Maxwell pleading guilty in June of the same year to charges of “negligent homicide, conspiracy to commit assault, hazing, obstructing justice and making false official statements to investigators” being sentenced to a term of four years’ confinement, a reduction in rank to E-1, and a bad-conduct discharge. Finally, DeDolph pled guilty to similar charges, including manslaughter, in January of 2021 being sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment while Madera-Rodriguez is still awaiting a trial date. Virtually all of the soldiers, in their pleas or through statements from their attorneys, have stated that they never intended to harm Melgar.
With the Melgar case, the soldiers were charged with felony murder, among an assortment of other crimes. In the UCMJ, felony murder is considered met with three criteria, these being
“a premeditated design to kill…intends to kill or inflict great bodily harm…[and] is engaged in an act which is inherently dangerous to another and evinces a wanton disregard of human life; or is engaged in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of burglary, rape, rape of a child, sexual assault, sexual assault of a child, aggravated sexual contact, sexual abuse of a child, robbery, or aggravated arson,”.
There was clear premeditation of the event (the planning of the hazing at the restaurant, the gathering of duct tape and sledgehammer, the acquiring of the Malian and British conspirators) and the act was one which was dangerous and demonstrated a disregard of human life (physically restraining another soldier by use of force and arranging he be photographed with a partially clothed man while unconscious). The most difficult area for the prosecution to provide proof would be in the “intent to kill or inflict great bodily harm,”. I argue this could have been accomplished had the prosecution been more uncompromising in their desires to hold trials for those soldiers responsible and been seeking high charges for all of those involved. Had this tactic been adopted, perhaps one of the soldiers would have become more open to testifying against the others and would have provided new information or testimony which would have indicated an intent on the parts of some or all to deliberately inflict harm upon Melgar.
As well, the lack of defense in charging for attempted rape is truly shocking. Applicable under Article 120, Aggravated Sexual Contact is defined as being the, “touching, or causing another person to touch, either directly or through the clothing, the vulva, penis, scrotum, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person, with an intent to abuse, humiliate, harass, or degrade any person or to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person. Touching may be accomplished by any part of the body or an object,”. Given the statements provided by the SEALs and Raiders and the evidence collected through eyewitness interviews, it is obvious that the incapacitation of Melgar was done with the intent to render him unconscious in order to take a photograph of him with a half-clothed man in order to embarrass him. The SEALs and Raiders’ plan clearly meets the standards for Aggravated Sexual Contact. While this plan was never carried out, the prosecution could have tried the four on attempted aggravated sexual assault, carrying another charge that most likely, had the case gone to trial, would have found them guilty of sexual crimes and forced them to register as sex offenders.
From a legal perspective, while pleaing allowed time, court resources, and money to be saved, this case, given the circumstances and those involved, warranted a felony murder trial. Despite the evidence from the mouths of the soldiers themselves (in addition to forensic evidence showing the mutilation of Melgar’s body and the autopsy report), the U.S. Navy chose instead to provide plea deals to most of the soldiers involved when the felony murder charge should have been more actively sought.
The death of Melgar in Mali, however, illustrates a much larger problem within the SEAL community, one focusing on accountability and responsibility. Since the beginning of the formal creation of SEAL Team Six, there was a desire to be different from other SEAL teams. The first commander of Team Six, Richard Marcinko, had cultivated a personality as a rebel within the SEALs and seemed to encourage a similar sentiment amongst his subordinates who garnered a reputation, “for racking up drunken driving arrests, abusing narcotics and crashing rental cars on training exercises with near impunity”. This type of leadership style, behavior, and culture can further be seen in more modern-day operations in the War on Terrorism and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. An investigation by The Intercept details years of abuses and crimes while more recent events have reported on drunkenness and rapes on operations, heavy illicit narcotics usage, and the murder of civilians.
While this behavior is not limited to the SEALs, it is rather minimal in other SOF groups. This begs the question as to why? I believe the answer to this lies in the training, cultural, and leadership habits of the SEALs. In a piece for the NY Times, the authors write that “Delta Force members, who have a reputation for going by the book, often start out as regular infantry, then move up through the Army’s Ranger units and Special Forces teams before joining Delta. But SEAL Team 6 is more isolated from the rest of the Navy, with many of its men entering the brutal SEAL training pipeline from outside the military,”. This type of training program is vastly different from the Army and Marines in which candidates must demonstrate the levels of professionality, physicality, and mental awareness to satisfactorily complete their mission. The constant reliance upon SOF forces (especially the SEALs) in the past two decades has also partially contributed to some of the disciplinary issues seen.
Signs of reformation and individual/team responsibility emerged in mid-2019 with the placement of Rear Admiral Collin P. Green as Naval Special Warfare Command who pledged to work on solving the personal and professional problems ingrained within the SEALs. However, within the year, Green announced he would be taking on the role of Chief of Staff for USSOCOM following a very public disagreement with President Donald Trump over Green’s support of, “a review to remove Edward Gallagher from the Navy SEALs”. For the time remaining, it seems that the desires of Green to reform the SEAL culture and ethos have been placed on hold, especially considering his replacement, Rear Admiral H. Wyman Howard III, had once purchased hatchets for his Team Six members and instructed: “them to bloody [it]”. President Trump’s pardoning of soldiers convicted of various, appalling war crimes has made the road towards an effective, professional, and dutiful fighting force that obeys the law and holds themselves accountable when wrongdoing occurs all the more difficult.
The plea deals the U.S. Navy has provided to DeDolph, Matthews, and Maxwell does not show a commitment to the rule of law nor does it provide the level of justice that should have been given to the Melgar family. Furthermore, it simply imbues the belief that Special Operators will face rather minimal punishment for breaking the UCMJ and their own Oath. If this is the punishment that a soldier faces for killing one of their own, then why should any Operator on assignment think twice about killing an unarmed civilian, a captured enemy soldier, or a superior officer?
Alan C. Cunningham is a student pursuing a Master of Arts degree in International Relations at Norwich University. He will be joining the United States Army upon the completion of his degree in the Summer of 2021 and also plans to gain a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham and a JD from Syracuse College of Law. He has previously been published in the U.S. Army War College’s War Room and Small Wars Journal.
Suggested Citation: Alan C. Cunningham, A Miscarriage of Justice: The Pleaing of Tony DeDolph and the Elusion of Accountability, JURIST – Student Commentary, February 10th, 2021, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2021/02/alan-cunningham-navy-tony-dedolph/.
This article was prepared for publication by Vishwajeet Deshmukh, a JURIST staff editor. Please direct any questions or comments to him at commentary@jurist.org.
