In today’s update, we speak about a recent trend we’ve noticed in military sexual assault cases. We note that victims are backing out on their prior promise to participate right before trial.
This means that after all of the preparation for a trial, days, or even minutes before a trial the alleged victim decides they are refusing to participate.
The Constitution makes it almost a guarantee that someone accused of sexual assault in the military will have a right to cross examine their accuser if the case actually goes to a court-martial. However, if an alleged victim refuses to participate, it may mean the end of the court-martial, but it could begin a whole host of administrative issues.
We wanted to just check in with you and talk a little bit about a trend that we’re seeing in military sexual assault cases around the world.
This trend is basically when a complaining witness-an accuser-a victim-whatever you want to call them, backs out of testifying in a court martial proceeding. Sometimes that happens early in the process during the investigative stage. sometimes it happens maybe a little later in the process after an article 32 preliminary hearing. Sometimes it even happens at the last minute.
For example, we were in a case out of Korea at Camp Humphreys where we interviewed the alleged victim the night before trial. About an hour after our interview we received word that she no longer wished to participate in the prosecution of that particular court martial.
It’s a disturbing trend and it’s a trend that we’re seeing all over the world without regard for what service, so we’re seeing it in the Navy, in the Air Force, in the Army, and in the Marine Corps, and in the Coast Guard as well.
An alleged victim is making the decision not to testify at trial. In the civilian world you’d think that that would end the case, but not the case in the military. Unfortunately in a lot of circumstances we’re seeing, even when alleged victims or complaining witnesses choose not to testify, the command is taking some other adverse action against that particular member. Most often that looks like a letter of reprimand or a general officer memorandum of
Reprimand (GOMOR). After that administrative paperwork is done, our clients almost always has to fight for his or her career at a discharge proceeding.
What this new reality means for us at Golden Law is a couple of things. The first thing is wetry to cultivate positive relationships with alleged victims and their their lawyers and so from time to time we might have conversations with special victims council and victims legal counsel to see truly if this particular complaining witness wants to testify because if they don’t want to testify sometimes dropping court martial charges is a great result for our clients but then after that we know what the command is going to do they’re going to take some other action against the member, remain aggressive, and what is important for us to do is to remain aggressive. It is very very disappointing to see the command deal with allegations of sexual assault through some kind of letter of reprimand.
If a case does go to an administrative discharge board instead of trial, we fight at a board just like we would fight at a court martial because it’s your career on the line and it’s important that we work hard to protect your career and ensure that you can continue to serve.
It seems like this trend of alleged victims complaining witnesses dropping out of investigations and court martial proceedings is not unique and it’s not something that is attributable to Covid or to any other trend that’s going on right now frankly it looks like this type of thing is going to continue and for us at Golden Law the important way to approach this is to continue to push for our clients continue to work hard aggressively defending these allegations, continue to work hard, and we believe that creates the best path to success. In the past few years we’ve had a number of boards come back with decisions to retain our clients in the military despite the allegations against them because we were able to aggressively confront, not only the allegations in the case, but also the alleged victim’s decision not to testify.
