Up periscope

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a book review of Richard North Patterson’s new book which is about a court-martial.  Yes, it’s about a Army officer who returns from Iraq, kills his former commander, and

As the case unfolds, Mr. Patterson gives the reader a tutorial in military justice as well as the complexities of PTSD. He also makes clear his stand against the war through testimonies from personnel involved with McCarran in Iraq.

The tension rises throughout the court-martial: Will the judge allow PTSD as a defense? Will the jury believe how the war changed not just McCarran, but the man he killed?

Haven’t read it and probably won’t until it’s free.  Hollywood did for me watching fictional movies about military justice (remember all the issues in A Few Good Men, and of course JAG, and Navy NCIS [how sweet that a show about NCIS should be called Navy Navy Criminal Investigative Service])

Despite the federal court ruling in California, it would be unwise for active duty servicemembers who are gay to assume the military will immediately change its policy.

The Frontiersman reports (this is Ramrod Five related):

In addition to murder, Morlock is also now charged with using an illegal drug, hashish, and with beating a civilian “on the body with his hands and feet, threatening to kill him if he spoke about hashish use within the platoon,” the amended charging document says.

Here is a link to a New York Times article which is part of its Women in the News section and focuses on the judge.

In her 86-page opinion, she called the law, passed by Congress in 1993, an unconstitutional violation of First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and Fifth Amendment guarantees of substantive due process.

CAAFLog reports that Sgt Quintanilla was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday.

Sgt Quintanilla was convicted in 1996 of the premeditated murder of his squadron’s executive officer, the attempted premeditated murder of his squadron’s commanding officer, and the attempted premeditated murder of a gunnery sergeant.

In 2005, the Navy-Marine Corps Court set aside the findings and sentence.  60 M.J. 852.  In 2006, CAAF reversed the portion of NMCCA’s opinion setting aside the findings, but affirmed the portion setting aside the sentence.  63 M.J. 29.

The crimes and trial occurred before life without parole was a permissible sentence.

CAAF action in United States v. Trigueros, a discovery case.  CAAF denied a petition.  See posting about the case here.

News-Press reports:  (related to Ramrod Five Article 32s)

The parents of a U.S. soldier from Cape Coral who, with other troops, is accused of killing Afghan civilians say they have evidence their son is innocent.

Christopher Winfield, the father of Army Spc. Adam Winfield, 22, says he tried five times to pass urgent Internet messages from his son to the Army. Troops in his unit had killed an Afghan civilian, planned more killings and threatened him to keep quiet about it.

See also this New York Times piece.

BOLO:  The AP reports:

Four prisoners with links to al-Qaida being guarded by American troops escaped from a maximum-security prison in Baghdad and are still at large, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday. . . . U.S. troops found two detainees attempting to escape from the compound on Wednesday evening, the military said in a statement. When they conducted a sweep of the whole facility, they discovered that four other detainees were missing.

This is not the first time that prisoners have broken out of American-run detention facilities in Iraq; 11 Iraqis broke out of the U.S.’s Camp Bucca in April 2005 although many were later recaptured. A month earlier U.S. officials there discovered a 600-foot tunnel leading out of Camp Bucca.

In 2006, five detainees escaped from the Fort Suse Theater internment facility near Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad; they were later apprehended by Kurdish security officials.

Are you being stalked – by the police?  That’s becoming the fourth amendment issue de jour.  I posted about x, and here is a piece in the Washington Times that sets the issue up nicely.  There is a great deal of attention paid to stalkers who take advantage of technology to victimize people for fun or hate – behavior characterized as creepy. 

A dissenting judge in that case wrote that the police behavior was "creepy and un-American."

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