Bales' money/marriage problems, criminal history
Odd thing is, an article the other day said that his family had hired his current high profile attorney and would be paying for it since his wife had a "high level position" with good pay in a "well known" company in Seattle. Yet this article tells of years and years of financial problems, lost houses, etc. Googling her name (as it is in the article: Kari Bales) shows that she works as a project manager for WaMu. I don't know enough about that company to know what is considered a "high level position" and good pay.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_AFGHANISTAN_SUSPECT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-03-17-20-10-34
In Washington state, court records showed a 2002 arrest for assault on a girlfriend. Bales pleaded not guilty and was required to undergo 20 hours of anger management counseling, after which the case was dismissed.
A separate hit-and-run charge was dismissed in Sumner, Wash.'s municipal court three years ago, according to records. It isn't clear from court documents what Bales hit; witnesses saw a man in a military-style uniform, with a shaved head and bleeding, running away.
When deputies found him in the woods, Bales told them he fell asleep at the wheel. He paid about $1,000 in fines and restitution and the case was dismissed in October 2009.
Dan Conway, a military attorney who represented one of four Lewis-McChord soldiers convicted in the deliberate killings of three Afghan civilians in 2010, said whether legal scrapes affect a soldier's career depends in part on whether they prompt the Army to issue administrative penalties. The punishments are typically recorded in official personnel files.
Over the past decade, Conway said, the military has sometimes been lax in administering such punishments. As a result, soldiers who might be bad apples sometimes remain in service longer than they otherwise might have.