Word: girard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...court's decision has no effect on Girard, since Girard, a serviceman, has no right to trial by U.S. civil courts. Point at issue in his case: whether under the status-of-forces agreement he should be tried by a U.S. court-martial or a Japanese court for allegedly killing a Japanese woman on a U.S. Army rifle range...
...Remember Pearl Harbor!" "For the sake of good relations between Japan and America we shall conduct a fair trial," said the Japanese chief district justice slated to try Girard. But the voice of Tokyo was soon drowned out by the growing uproar in the U.S. "Sold down the river," cried the Veterans of Foreign Wars; TO THE WOLVES, SOLDIER, cried the New York Daily News. In Girard's home town, Ottawa, Ill. (he lived there in the family trailer one year before enlisting in 1953) relatives and friends got up a 182-ft. petition protesting "a clear violation...
Soon letters were pouring into newspapers, heavily backing an American trial for Girard. Congressmen, from left to right, were hammering at the Dulles-Wilson ruling; e.g., Ohio's Senator John Bricker accused the Government of "sacrificing an American soldier to appease Japanese public opinion." Girard's defense attorney, who was recommended for the job by the Hearst New York Journal-American, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington to have Girard brought back to the U.S., announced plans to subpoena Dulles, Wilson and Army Secretary Wilber Brucker. The counterblasts were soon rolling in from all over Asia...
...uproar roared on. Colorado Republican Senator Gordon Allott proposed a bipartisan congressional investigation. District Court Judge Joseph C. McGarraghy directed U.S. authorities to show cause why Girard should not be returned to the U.S. "You're a national hero," Girard's brother told him by transpacific telephone from Ottawa. Whereupon Specialist Girard, who had won considerable public sympathy in Japan by virtue of having a Japanese fiancee, sacked his Japanese lawyer (selected by him and paid for from U.S. funds) and flirted with the idea of playing to the hilt the new role that his brother...
...status-of-forces agreements, in spite of the ruckus over Specialist Third Class Girard in Japan, are working out amazingly well. Status-of-forces agreements have contributed in six years of steady growth toward easing the tensions between allies, and have added up to a remarkable good-sense show of international justice from which the U.S. and its allies alike have benefited. One Girard case provides an uproar in the U.S. and Japan, for example, but 5,544 other U.S.-Japanese cases that came up last year worked out smoothly. Over a longer term, fewer than half a dozen...