Generals Cleared in Nuns' Deaths, Rapes

W E S T   P A L M   B E A C H, Fla., Nov. 3 -- Two former Salvadoran generals who retired to Florida were cleared of liability by a jury today in the 1980 rape-murders of four American church women

The federal jury decided that former Salvadoran Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, former head of the Salvadoran National Guard, weren’t responsible for the slayings. The women were killed by Salvadoran troops.

The men were not in the courtroom for the verdict. As the court deputy read the verdicts, there was an audible sigh of disappointment from relatives of the women and the attorneys who brought the civil lawsuit.

After the jury left the courtroom, Kurt Klaus, a lawyer for the generals, turned and extended his hand to Bill Ford, brother of slain nun Ita Ford. The men solemnly shook hands.

“He just said he was sorry for what happened,” Ford said later. Ford said he was surprised by the verdict: “I thought the evidence was overwhelming.”

No Smoking Gun Robert Montgomery, the attorney for the families, said he wasn’t able to prove a solid connection between the deaths and the generals.

“We didn’t have the smoking gun,” he said. “We didn’t have an order from the generals .... We didn’t have anything but circumstantial evidence.”

Jury foreman Bruce Schnirel said the 10 jurors did not believe the former generals had enough control over their troops to be held responsible.

“It was presented to us as such a chaotic time,” said Schnirel, a 50-year-old U.S. Postal Service worker. “There was no way we could say they could control their troops.”

The jury began deliberations Wednesday, three weeks after the wrongful death trial began with photos of the bodies of Ford, nuns Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan flashed on a screen.

Sought $100 Million Their families had asked jurors to award $100 million in compensatory damages plus an unspecified amount in punitive damages. But family members said during the trial that they would be happy to see the generals forced to leave their retirement havens and go back home. They also hoped the outcome of the trial would provide U.S. immigration officials with ammunition to somehow do that.