Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said Monday that sexual assaults committed by members of the military continue to be "vastly underreported" even as the military claims to be making progress on reducing such crimes. Gillibrand, who has thus far lost her bid to change the way sex crimes are prosecuted in the military, said the military had declined to hand over much of the material she sought for a report she was compiling. But the material she did receive revealed disturbing patterns in the way the cases were handled,
reports Richard Lardner.
The senator said her analysis of 107 sexual assault cases found punishments that were too lenient and the word of the alleged assailant was more likely to be believed than the victim. Less than a quarter of the cases went to trial and just 11 resulted in conviction for a sex crime.
Gillibrand said more than 50 percent of the victims were female civilians, but the military doesn't survey civilians in its reports on sexual assault.
In one of the cases Gillibrand reviewed, an airman allegedly pinned his ex-girlfriend down and then raped her. During the investigation, two other civilian victims stepped forward to accuse the same airman of sexual assault. One of them, the wife of another service member, awoke in the night to find the airman in bed with her. Two of his fingers were inside her vagina. The investigating officer recommended the airman be court-martialed. If convicted, he faced a lengthy prison term.
But the investigator's superiors decided against a trial and used administrative procedures to discharge the airman under "other than honorable conditions." The Air Force said the victims preferred this course of action. Two of them had decided they "wanted no part in the case," according to the Air Force, while the third said she did not want to testify.
To Gillibrand, the outcome was suspicious and suggested the victims may have been intimidated.
"It's frustrating because you look at the facts in these cases and you see witnesses willing to come forward, getting the medical exam and either eventually withdrawing their case or the investigators deciding that her testimony wasn't valid or believable," she said.
Looks like it may be time to revisit Gillibrand's legislative overhaul of the system, which would take military commanders out of the business of deciding which crimes gets prosecuted.
That judgment would rest with seasoned military attorneys who have prosecutorial experience. The Pentagon is opposed to the change.
Of course.