Justice in uniform

Imagine for a moment that you report a crime, and the prosecutor responsible for deciding whether to charge the alleged perpetrator is not a lawyer. Further, imagine he or she is potentially required to take orders from the accused’s supervisors outside the auspices of the courtroom. This may sound like a wild hypothetical, but it is more or less the situation that can arise in the military, where those responsible for deciding whether or not to bring courts martial against service-members accused of serious crimes are military officers who don’t necessarily have special legal training and can be in the same chain of command as the person being investigated.

The good news is that bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate, led by New York’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, have sponsored bills that would shift this evidently broken system to one more observant of due process, putting serious investigations in the hands of trained prosecutors who don’t report to the accused or the accuser. Proponents have folded versions of this concept into the National Defense Authorization Act, the massive defense spending bill that typically passes with ease on an annual basis.

The bad news is that the NDAA has gotten sucked into partisan combat in the Senate this year over the inclusion of a variety of amendments, including the ones related to military investigations. Despite widespread support, there’s a chance that the provisions could be stripped out by the two chambers’ Armed Services Committees. This would be an unacceptable casualty of political war.

It has become abundantly clear that the current structure has abjectly failed to deal with misconduct in general and sexual assault in the armed forces specifically, with a staggering nearly one in four servicewomen reporting some form of such abuse or assault. When a process has failed for decades, the answer is to try something different. Conservatives who complain ad infinitum about the supposedly weakening military would be monumentally hypocritical to tank a reform that will address a real crisis in the ranks.