Donald Ball's big-city lawyers really like Utah.

The hotels and international airport are so convenient. And our uber-patriotic support for the Iraq war and anything-goes gun laws also appeal.

So the Utahphiles figured Ball, one of six disgraced Blackwater guards accused of mowing down a crowd of unarmed Iraqis last year, had a better chance of getting off here than just about anywhere else in America.

The smarty-pants attorneys flew four other guys into town, put them up in one of those convenient hotels and formed a human shield for the walk of shame into Salt Lake City's Moss Federal Courthouse on Monday.

"Any of the jurisdictions where these people live would have been a great place," says Salt Lake City attorney Brent Hatch.

But they venue-shopped, picking Utah over New Hampshire, Tennessee and Texas. Ball, a 26-year-old former Marine and three-tour Iraq veteran, is from West Valley City.

U.S. District Magistrate Paul Warner rejected the fancy lawyering, sending the case back to D.C. The attorneys won't get a chance to exploit conventional wisdom about this place.

On Sept. 16, 2007, a convoy of four armored Blackwater trucks responded to reports of a car bomb near the Green Zone in Baghdad. Stopped in traffic and afraid they were under fire, six of the 20 Blackwater contractors sprayed bullets and lobbed grenades. When it was over, 17 were dead and many more were injured.

"None of the victims of this shooting was armed. None was an insurgent. Many were shot while inside civilian vehicles that were attempting to flee," says U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor.

Blackwater claims its employees were ambushed.

After the massacre, Iraq's parliament changed Bremer's Law so that U.S. contractors would no longer be exempt from Iraqi law. Besides Hatch and a gaggle of local lawyers, the guards have hired exclusive "superlawyers," attorneys who defended Enron, Freddie Mac executives and an arms dealer. One guard already has pleaded guilty. This one simply can't be chalked up to the fog of war.

Ball's attorneys were hoping somehow a Salt Lake County jury would be more sympathetic to indiscriminate slaughter or that the snuffed lives of Iraqis would be meaningless here.

"Honorable men who have committed no crime have no reason to hide behind the skirts of 'sympathetic' conservatives," says Pratap Chatterjee, managing editor of CorpWatch. "The people of Utah should reject any attempt to use their state as a safe haven."

Now we'll never know if the strategy would have worked.

Probably just as well.

walsh@sltrib.com