Court Martial Lawyer - Group urges more openness in courts-martial

Court Martial Lawyer - Group urges more openness in courts-martial

By Rick Maze - Staff writer

A nonprofit group representing the news media wants Congress to order the military to provide more information to the public about military courts martial and criminal investigations.
The Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press says in a report released Aug. 15 that standardized information about the date, time, and location of military trials, including the name of the accused and the charges they face, are not routinely available, making it difficult for the news media to cover judicial hearings and for the public — including other service members and their families — to know the outcome.

“If you are a victim of an assault or some other type of crime, and the military assures you it is going to be taken care of, how could you know they took care of it?” said former media lawyer Lucy Dalglish, the committee’s executive director.

Having open trials attended by the public also is the right of accused service members, she said. “The right to a fair and public trial is a bedrock principle of democracy,” Dalglish said. “Unfortunately, in this regard, members of the armed services have fewer rights than those granted to criminal defendants in civilian courts.”

Such a change could be ordered by military regulation, but the committee, which provides legal advice for reporters, believes the history of battles with the military over trying to obtain details of legal proceedings is reason enough to get Congress involved rather than solely depending on the military to make a policy change that it could later reverse.

Dalglish said committee members have been talking with Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the House Armed Services Committee chairman, about the need for changing the military’s policies.
The committee is backing up its request with data from a survey done by Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications that shows the difficulty in getting basic information about pending courts-martial through official channels.

The survey had callers try to contact 99 bases to determine their policies for releasing information about courts-martial. Some bases did not respond at all, but of the 75 that did, 45 percent refused to provide any information about upcoming pre-trial hearings and 37 percent refused to provide the schedule for upcoming courts-martial. In cases where information was provided, essential details — like the defendant’s name or criminal charges against the defendant — were withheld.

The Navy was the least helpful and the Coast Guard was the most helpful to the Tully Center callers. “More than 57 percent of Navy survey respondents completely denied public access to the requested docketing information,” the report says. “The Coast Guard denied the callers’ requests 22 percent of time, the Army denied 25 percent of requests, the Air Force denied 32 percent of requests, and the Marines denied 43 percent of requests.”

The report says base officials asked for courts-martial details were “often evasive” and cited nonexistent policies for withholding information. For example, one official in Japan said it could be a security threat to talk about the scheduled date of a court-martial and an official in Hawaii said giving out information would violate the Privacy Act.

Dalglish said she does not believe the military is involved in a widespread effort to cover up trials. “I just don’t think they think about these things,” she said.

However, the report — based in part on interviews with reporters covering military justice, including some members of the Army Times Publishing Co. staff — says there is a perception that the services are reluctant to release embarrassing or damaging information.

This is not the first time an effort has been made to create a military-wide docket system for courts-martial. In 2006, the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit group made of up civilian attorneys and law school professors, and the Washington College of Law at American University, asked the services to create a single docketing system and offered to help do it.
The services declined, saying it would be inappropriate for them to work with a nongovernment agency on a military court docket system.

Dalglish said she hopes for a different outcome this time. “If DoD wanted to, they could do it and do it right now,” she said. If the Defense Department doesn’t want to take on the task, it should fall to Congress, which approves other changes in the Uniformed Code of Military Justice and the Manual for Courts-Martial, to do it, she said.




Michael Waddington is a court martial lawyer - court martial attorney that defends military personnel worldwide as well as deployed civilian contractors subject to the UCMJ. He defends Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Coast Guard, and civilian contractor court martial cases. He has successfully defended military personnel as a court martial lawyer Army Navy Marine & Air Force court martials in Germany, England, Italy, Iraq, Kuwait, Korea, Okinawa, Japan, Yokota, and throughout the United States. military-defense-lawyer-recentcases.htm.