Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel
Ever since President Obama said, in May, that military sexual assault should lead to the offenders being "prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged," military lawyers have been using that as a defense, claiming—with some success—that it constituted "unlawful command influence." Now, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and White House lawyers are
trying to clarify:
“There are no expected or required dispositions, outcomes or sentences in any military justice case, other than what result from the individual facts and merits of a case and the application to the case of the fundamentals of due process of law,” Mr. Hagel wrote in a memorandum dated Aug. 6 that is to be disseminated throughout the military. [...]
Mr. Obama’s legal team, as well as Mr. Hagel, are trying to undo the potential damage to sexual assault cases in the future. Mr. Hagel’s memorandum quoted Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, as saying that the president “expects all military personnel who are involved in any way in the military justice process to exercise their independent and professional judgment.”
While the principle that service members should be protected from such influence is certainly a sound one, this particular case seems to be taking it a little far. After all, the president was basically saying that, if found guilty, people should be punished in the ways that people guilty of those crimes should be punished. He wasn't trying to sidestep due process by naming names of people who should be thus punished and it's not like he was introducing some new and novel concept in punishment—or, to the extent he was, it's because the military has so badly failed at taking sexual assault seriously as a crime and prosecuting and punishing it.
Nonetheless, if saying "no, really, that was not a direct order to find all members of the military charged with sexual assault guilty and do exactly these things to them" is what it takes to take unlawful command influence out of the picture as a defense, then yay for the release of this memo.
Tell the U.S. Senate to take action against sexual assault in the military by passing Sen. Gillibrand’s Military Justice Improvement Act.