A federal appeals court on Tuesday found that a judge lacked jurisdiction when he wiped out the conviction of Bowe Bergdahl, the former Army sergeant who walked off a base in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured by the Taliban.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit effectively reinstates Mr. Bergdahl’s punishment, including his dishonorable discharge from the military in 2017, Mr. Bergdahl’s lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell, said in an interview.
“Obviously, we are disappointed by the outcome,” Mr. Fidell said. “This entire controversy has lasted a very long time. But it continues to be an important case, not only for Sergeant Bergdahl but for the integrity of the military justice system.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Fidell said Mr. Bergdahl had the right to ask for a rehearing before the same three-judge panel, or to seek a review by the entire appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court. “In the coming days,” he said, “we are going to give very close attention to our future course of action.”
The ruling represents the latest setback for Mr. Bergdahl, 40, an Idaho native. His action in 2009 led to an extensive search-and-rescue mission, during which U.S. troops were injured.
An Army investigation concluded in 2015 that Mr. Bergdahl had intended to hike to another military post and report perceived wrongdoing in his unit. But he was captured by militants hours later, and was held for five years. A sanity board later found that he had been suffering from a “severe mental disease or defect” at the time.
In 2014, President Barack Obama secured Mr. Bergdahl’s freedom in exchange for sending five Taliban detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Qatar. Mr. Obama appeared alongside Mr. Bergdahl’s parents in the Rose Garden. The national security adviser at the time, Susan E. Rice, later praised Mr. Bergdahl for serving with “honor and distinction.”
Former soldiers then came forward to describe the circumstances of the sergeant’s capture, accusing him of desertion. Republicans seized on those accounts to contend that the prisoner swap had not been worth it.
President Trump railed against Mr. Bergdahl during his first campaign for the White House in 2016, calling him a “traitor” and a “piece of garbage” who “deserved the death penalty.”
Mr. Bergdahl, who had been kept in brutal conditions and tortured during his five years in captivity, pleaded guilty in a military court in 2017 to desertion and to endangering the American troops sent to search for him.
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The military judge in that case, Col. Jeffery Nance of the Army, ordered that Mr. Bergdahl be dishonorably discharged, rejecting a 14-year prison sentence requested by the prosecution. The judge also reduced Mr. Bergdahl’s rank to private and required him to forfeit $1,000 a month of his pay for 10 months.
While the defense had told Colonel Nance that a sentence of dishonorable discharge would be appropriate, Mr. Fidell had said at the time that he hoped that it would be overturned. Such a discharge, he added, would deprive his client of health care and other “benefits he badly needs” from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
In 2023, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia threw out all orders and rulings by Colonel Nance after Oct. 16, 2017, the date Colonel Nance submitted an application to the Justice Department to become an immigration judge in the Trump administration.
Judge Walton found that Colonel Nance had not disclosed the application while he was presiding over Mr. Bergdahl’s case, raising the appearance of potential bias.
The case, Judge Walton wrote, presented “a unique situation where the military judge might be inclined to appeal to the president’s expressed interest in the plaintiff’s conviction and punishment.”
The government appealed Judge Walton’s decision, as did Mr. Bergdahl, who argued that the judge should have thrown out the entire case against him.
On Tuesday, the appeals court panel found that Judge Walton lacked the authority to vacate Mr. Bergdahl’s conviction and sentence.
The ruling turned on what the panel described as “nuanced questions” surrounding the relationship between federal district courts and military courts.
The authority to “vacate a court-martial judgment belongs to tribunals exercising direct appellate review, not district courts conducting collateral review,” Judge Robert L. Wilkins wrote. “Bergdahl’s claim thus conflicts with that longstanding limitation.”
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