Former U.S. Marine Michael Hardy entered a guilty plea on Wednesday to the first two counts of a six-count 2012 indictment. He received a straight probation sentence of 20 years.
Hardy was arrested by the then-operating Task Force headed by FBI Special Agent Ken Hillman, after responding to an Internet sting operation set up on Craigslist, which offered sexual encounters with underage girls.
His attorney, McCracken Poston, said Hardy "was diagnosed by the Veterans Administration just after his arrest in September of 2012 with having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from his role in the military of recovering the bodies and body parts of his fellow soldiers. He was like a zombie then, and could have been coaxed into agreeing to anything.”
“He served our country with honor, and he suffered greatly from recovering the bodies of his colleagues while under fire.”
"This was the ‘ground zero’ case of the controversy involving Angela Russell, who was then the wife of local businessman Emerson Russell, and this was the case that exposed the behavior of then-FBI Special Agent Hillman, who was investigated and was convicted of a federal offense regarding his misconduct in the Task Force. Hillman subsequently ‘retired’ from the FBI, citing that he himself had developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it being stated at the time of his own conviction that the then FBI agent acquired the condition from viewing pornography with Angela Russell.
"Ms. Russell had admitted the affair with Hillman in her divorce from Emerson Russell. Hillman had allowed Angela Russell to participate in and to conduct herself and act as a de facto law enforcement agent of the Task Force, providing her a gun and allowing her to handcuff suspects, and Russell had actually created the Craigslist post and had directed the communications with defendant Hardy. Hillman had also misrepresented Russell’s involvement on the task force to prosecutors and to a Catoosa County grand jury.
“Overall, this was a good outcome considering my client was facing a potential one-hundred twenty year prison sentence,” and in the course of this misguided task force very few of the defendants got straight probation.”