A federal appeals court on Friday threw out lengthy prison sentences of three former operatives for private mercenary firm Blackwater Worldwide—and ordered a retrial for a fourth operative who had received a life sentence—for their roles in the notorious 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, which left 14 unarmed Iraqis dead and another 17 wounded.

“The men, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough, and Nicholas Slatten, were convicted in October 2014 after years of legal battles,” Common Dreams reported in 2015, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced Slatten—who the government says fired the first shots—to life in prison and the other three men to “30 years and one day each on charges that included manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and using firearms while committing a felony.”

During the 10-week trial in 2014, “prosecutors said the four defendants, among 19 Blackwater guards providing security for State Department officials in Iraq, fired machine guns and grenade launchers in a reckless and out-of-control way after one of them falsely claimed their convoy, called Raven 23, was threatened by a car bomber,” the Washington Post reported.

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“While defense lawyers have argued that the men were acting in self-defense, federal prosecutors wrote that the men’s ‘crimes here were so horrendous—the massacre and maiming of innocents so heinous—that they outweigh any factors that the defendants may argue form a basis for leniency,'” Common Dreams reported.

The federal appeals court, in a split decision issued Friday, claimed prosecutors misapplied a law during the lower court’s trial, the New York Times reported:

According to the Post, spokesmen for the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips said Phillips’s office “is reviewing the opinion and has no further comment at this time.”

Paul Dickinson, an attorney who represented the families of six Iraqi massacre victims—including 9-year-old Ali Kinani, who was shot in the back of the head—shared their stories in a long series of tweets on Friday afternoon.

Some of Dickinson’s messages were retweeted by journalist Jeremy Scahill, who authored the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. In a piece for The Intercept following the 2014 conviction, Scahill welcomed the ruling, but also outlined the greater issues with U.S. military contractors, particularly Blackwater and its infamous former CEO, Erik Prince. Scahill wrote:

More recently, the Blackwater founder—who is also the brother the Education Secretary Betsy Devos—has been tied to the Trump administration. In April, as Common Dreams reported, government officials told members of the press that Prince “took part in a clandestine meeting with a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication’ between Moscow and the White House.”