Posted on 10/30/2007 2:54:17 PM PDT by RedRover
He’s not disillusioned, just tired of raising a family on 20% of what a talented trial attorney could earn outside the service. He’s going to take his meager pension and benefits and retire to a big law firm in a major city and start defending multi-millionaires and their families at $450 an hour, or more.
That is a shame. But he can hold his head up high.
Just wait until Hitlery becomes POTUS. You will see many great career military personnel leaving all branches of service in droves!
After his service to our nation, I hope LtCol Vokey has a brilliant success in civilian life. We can hope someone will follow in his footsteps in the Corps.
He fought for guys that the military and civilian types tried to screw over for political expediency. The Haditha Marines will attest to that.
Your bitterness is pathetic and misplaced.
Gives the impression that the unit had two commanders. That type of gross inaccuracy is simply pathetic.
Interesting take. Thanks for the PING.
Willful ignorance on NPR's part? Or just stupidity? There is no "jury duty" for a Court Martial. The Court *is* the jury, one that can ask questions of witnesses, defense and prosecution.
He got orders to serve on a Court, civilians get called to jury duty, and far too many try like heck to get out of it, then grouse about the poor quality of juries.
While the Court is called by the Convening Authority, usually the commander. He doesn't get to pick which officers serve on it. The JAG office picks them at random from a list of eligibles. The Commander himself does not serve on the Court.
Defense, Prosecution (and a JAG may be one in one trial, the other in the next, depending on location and size of the JAG contingent) and the military Judge, who is also a JAG officer, usually only slightly more senior than the other two, are all supposed to be going after the truth, not blindly defending a client, or going after a defendent, regardless of the facts of the case.
Of course that is the ideal, and like any organization, individual goals and the need to "stand out" may pervert that concept. That is what seems to have happened. But then again my brief experience with all that, as member of a panel (not a full court martial, but run much the same) was 33 years ago, so what do I know?
I wouldn't too suprised to find NPR has grossly distorted what Lt. Col. Vokey had to say.
But then, they are the worse of the Drive By Media, even though they can hardly be called "Mainstream".
NPR’s crackerjack military correspondent at work!
Hate me if you want, kids, but this one really is Bush's fault.
The military has juries that are usually composed of officers and the jury gets to assign punishment in most cases. It’s still a jury and calling it “jury duty” is not entirely incorrect.
If this is an accurate quote, the guy has been a defense lawyer too long. The guarantees of the Constitution do not apply to enemy combatants, especially ones who wear no uniforms and hide amongst, or behind, the civilian populace. This is long settled US law, despite what the current crop of judges and justices might say.
About the only thing they are entitled to is due process and then only to determine if they are indeed illegal combatants. Their specific "crimes" ( I would say "acts") don't really matter much after that, except in so far as we choose to treat them differently depending on their individual circumstances. We'd be well within US and international treaty obligation to just shoot them.
No, NPR is actually quite moderate compared to what Michael Savage has had to say on this subject. NPR appears to have been rather charitable to the USMC here compared to Savage.
The U.S. has imprisoned hundreds of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, in a military legal system that Vokey denounces as “horrific.” Vokey saw the system first-hand, when he agreed two years ago to defend a teenager there who had been charged with murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Vokey said he knew the case would be difficult, but he discovered that the legal system at Guantanamo is a “sham.”
Allrighty then...
And if you called a horse apple a rose, it woudl still stink. They are not the same as civilian juries, they have different duties, and different powers. They are called military Courts. As in Courts Martial. (Martial == military). If a JAG officer said during a trial, "may it please the Court", he wouldn't be talking to the judge, as a civilian lawyer would be.
They are usually composed of officers, but any enlisted defendant has the right to have enlisted members on his Court. Of course the defense JAG officers, and any civilian lawyer who knows the system, will usually advise against doing that. Officers are much easier on defendants than senior enlisted members. :)
For example, after officials filed criminal charges against eight Marines on the grounds that they were involved in massacring 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, the Corps assembled one of the biggest legal teams in recent history to prosecute the men. But Vokey says officials told him he had to use a much smaller team to defend them. "It made me very angry," Vokey says. "We didn't have the people and the tools that we needed to adequately defend these Marines. It really sends a message that the Marine Corp's trying to railroad these guys."
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Well, no poop, Sherlock. The "message" has been obvious from the beginning. OF COURSE the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon and their civilian bosses are trying to scapegoat and railroad the Haditha Marines. It's all about running like scared bunnies from the liberal Democrat newsrooms while at the same time cozying up to the Democrats in Congress.
Other than the above quote and his disgust with defense resources provided to accused Marines, however, Volkey is out of line. He sounds like the typical ACLU sort that has so seriously infected JAG like an oozing boil of puss during the past 10 - 15 years. The detainees at Guantanamo? Gimme a break. And his lame excuse for his unwillingness to name names says a lot.
But in the end, an NPR story which lauds a Marine Corps officer says more than anything.
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