For the love of Christ, I have about had it with our military justice system. They will find any excuse not to hold sexual predators accountable for their actions. I see no good reason why the president, as commander in chief, shouldn’t be able to say what he thinks appropriate minimal penalties are for soldiers who are convicted of sexual assault. Without referring to any specific case, Obama said the following in May:
“I expect consequences,” Obama said at a press conference in early May that came just as the Pentagon released a report detailing rising incidences of sexual assaults in 2012. “So I don’t just want more speeches or awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody’s engaging in this, they’ve got to be held accountable — prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.”
And now a judge has ruled that two defendants cannot be “punitively discharged” even if they are convicted because the president’s remarks have created “an unlawful command influence.” In other words, the president has made it clear that he expects sexual predators to be discharged, so they can’t be discharged. And if he said that he wanted murderers to be imprisoned, we couldn’t imprison murderers?
This is a stretch, even in the military system of justice where the participants are under the president’s command. It’s bad enough that commanders can set aside military convictions and ignore sentences, but now it’s not permissible for the president to even express his opinion about what should happen to rapists in the most general terms.
