Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
Friend and colleague Cully Stimson has a piece on military justice practitioner professionalism, similar to some others he has put out recently.
He is right on.
Of course this is nothing new. I came on active duty as a navy judge advocate in January 1908. The topics Cully talks were a topic then and have been a frequent topic all of the years of my active duty service through today in a civilian military law practice.
Sen. Ernst is wrong in one respect–the pilot program is unnecessary.
No wonder so many Americans on the left and right are disgusted and fed up with career Washington bureaucrats and insiders. Common sense ideas which folks outside the beltway understand and take for granted are hard to come by inside the beltway.
Exhibit A is the novel idea—to the Army, Air Force, and some key Senate staffers who don’t know better—that military prosecutors and defense lawyers should be experienced litigators, just like their civilian counterparts in every district attorney and public defender office in the country.
Give credit to Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, for proposing an amendment that would have required the services to establish career litigation tracks for select few JAGs so that they could deliver first-class justice to crime victims and defendants alike in the military.
But behind closed doors, outside the view of the public, her amendment was knee capped by professional bureaucrats in true Washington fashion. What emerged is an amendment that requires the services to carry out a “pilot program” on military justice to study the “feasibility and advisability of a military justice career track for judge advocates” (read: Conduct studies indefinitely).
Read more at Daily Signal.