Word: tamm
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...imprisonment by a U.S. Air Force court-martial which acted under a section in the 1950 Uniform Code of Military Justice giving jurisdiction to military tribunals over "all persons serving with, employed by or accompanying" the U.S. Armed Forces overseas. Last week in Washington, Federal District Judge Edward A. Tamm declared that section of the Uniform Code to be unconstitutional and ordered Mrs. Covert set free...
Legal Sanctuary? Judge Tamm made his ruling on the basis of the recent decision in the case of Robert Toth (TIME, Nov. 21), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that ex-servicemen cannot be tried by court-martial for crimes committed while in the armed forces. If the military thus has no jurisdiction over civilians who were at one time in the service, said Judge Tamm, then the military obviously has no jurisdiction over "persons who were civilians all the time...
...Judge Tamm acknowledged the fact that his ruling, if upheld by higher courts, would cause major problems for the armed forces. It surely would. There are more than 265,000 dependents overseas with American servicemen, along with nearly 142,000 civilian employees of the armed forces. All these would seem to be placed in a sort of legal sanctuary by Judge Tamm's projection of the Toth decision. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons estimates that the Tamm ruling could free at least 50 persons who, like Mrs. Covert, were civilians overseas with the armed forces and therefore beyond...
...Hand of the Thief? As Government lawyers sat down last week to figure out their appeal from the Tamm decision and to consider the ruling's possible effects, they developed more questions than answers. Among them: ¶ If U.S. military courts cannot try civilians abroad, who can? The U.S. may give back to the foreign countries which have surrendered it by treaty, jurisdiction over American civilians with its armed forces. But would such revision meet American standards of justice? For example, should an American national be forced to stand trial before a French Communist judge? Or should...
Both Judge Tamm in the Covert case and the Supreme Court in its Toth decision suggested a possible solution to the dilemma. The Congress, they said, could enact legislation giving the U.S. civil courts jurisdiction over certain civilians abroad who are exempted, by treaty or otherwise, from the jurisdiction of local courts. As a Defense Department spokesman said last week, in referring to the armed forces dependents and employees overseas: "They are U.S. citizens and we cannot leave them free to go their merry way with no accountability. We want all our people accountable somewhere...