Word: martially
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...week), pleasant-looking Marine veteran of Viet Nam, Lance Corporal Rafael Minichiello was absent without leave from Camp Pendleton, Calif. The Italian-born lad thought the Corps had cheated him of $200 in pay. To get even, he had broken into a PX and was facing a special court-martial when he quit Pendleton...
Commonplace Killings. Unsatisfactory and untidy as that ending was, it stemmed from a growing conviction in Washington that the impending courts-martial of the Berets would have been even messier. Two of the nation's most publicized lawyers, Edward Bennett Williams and F. Lee Bailey, had been hired by the defendants and were poised to portray their clients as victims of nasty rivalries among U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies. They would have blistered the U.S. commander in Viet Nam, General Creighton Abrams, for initiating the charges and would have exposed jealousies between the regular Army and the elite Special Forces...
...point out that he is a chief advocate of the President's ABM authorization bill that was before the House. What he did do was threaten to give three of the Berets a chance to rebut all charges in public hearings before his committee. If the courts-martial were held, he warned, they would become "the greatest mockery since the trial of Christ...
...code entitled servicemen to lawyers in all general courts-martial but not necessarily in special courts-martial (which outnumber general courts-martial by more than 20 to 1) unless the prosecutor was a lawyer. Because of a scarcity of military lawyers, most defendants at special courts-martial were represented by officers without law degrees. The U.C.M.J. also set up the U.S. Court of Military Appeals in Washington, which has decreed that men in uniform are protected by a number of the safeguards in the Bill of Rights...
...civilian rules do not always work within the autocratic framework of the military. Under the U.C.M.J., the C.O. not only convened a general court-martial but appointed the prosecutor, law officer (judge) and veniremen for the court-martial board (jury); he even selected the defense counsel, though the accused could ask for another one. Thus the code did not eliminate the phenomenon known as "command control." Looking back on his experience as a Marine legal officer during the Korean War, Boston Trial Lawyer Joseph Oteri describes the C.O.'s influence on military courts this way: "The word always filtered...