Word: martials
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wisdom & Wine. Before the court were the 1953 cases of Dorothy Krueger Smith and Clarice Covert. Mrs. Smith, daughter of wartime Army General Walter Krueger, was found guilty by a court-martial of stabbing her husband, an Army colonel, to death in their quarters in Japan. A court-martial convicted Mrs. Covert of the ax murder of her husband, an Air Force master sergeant, in England. Last year the Supreme Court ruled that their military convictions and life sentences for murder were valid, with Justices Tom Clark, Harold Burton, Stanley Reed. Sherman Minton and John Marshall Harlan in the majority...
...year intervening since the court's first decision Minton was replaced by William J. Brennan, and last week Justice Brennan joined the liberal-tending War ren-Douglas-Black bloc to hold court-martial trials unconstitutional for overseas dependents. Reed was succeeded by Justice Charles Evans Whittaker, who did not participate in last week's decision. Harlan switched sides with the candid admission that time had given him "an opportunity for greater reflection.'' And Frankfurter, his mind finally made up. voted with last week's majority (but. like Harlan, only insofar as it affected capital cases...
...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...
...that the host nation agrees to give "sympathetic consideration" to requests for waiver in cases which the U.S. deems to be of "particular importance." As this works out, U.S. authorities usually ask allied countries to waive primary jurisdiction and to return American offenders to the mercies of U.S. courts-martial; usually the allies comply. Out of all the 14,394 G.I. offenses subject to foreign jurisdiction last year, the allies turned back 9,614 cases...
...remarkably low crime rate and one of the highest leniency rates in the world. Foreign court sentences are usually much lighter than U.S. sentences. Last year, for example, German newspapers hounded seven G.I.s accused of raping a 15-year-old girl, but they fell silent when a U.S. court-martial handed down four life sentences, three for 40 years; the maximum sentence under German law for first-offense rape is three years...