Word: toth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Order to Shoot. The case began at an Air Force bomb dump in Taegu in September 1952. One night. Toth was on duty as sergeant of the guard. As he told the story later: "A gook who was drunk came into the area. The guard was on duty with a dog, and he hollered twice to the gook to halt, and when the gook didn't stop, he tried to get the dog to stop him, [but] the dog wouldn't attack. Then the guard fired two shots. These shots woke me, and I went to the area...
...unfortunate "gook." a South Korean civilian named Bang Soon Kil, was taken to a secluded revetment, where the guard killed him with a single shot. "I didn't want anything to do with it," Toth claimed, "so I got the hell out of there. When I was back at the guardhouse. I heard a shot, got into the jeep and went back to the bomb dump. When I got there, I saw the gook lying on the ground...
...life sentence of Airman Thomas L. Kinder, 21, the guard who fired the fatal shot, was reduced to two years. No one questioned the sentences, or the military's right to try Kinder and Schreiber. who are still in the Air Force. But the case of Bob Toth, a civilian, is a different matter...
Order to Return. While Toth was being yanked back to Korea, his family hired Pittsburgh Attorney Anthony McGrath, who sued for a writ of habeas corpus. The Air Force, McGrath insisted, had no right to take Toth into custody. He had been arrested without a warrant, moreover, and spirited out of the country with no hearing before a competent civilian authority. The Air Force claimed the authority of Article 3a of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which states that former servicemen who committed major crimes while in military service "shall not be relieved from amenability to trial by courts...
...case poses a crucial point. If the Uniform Code is constitutional, it could conceivably mean that in the future no ex-serviceman will be wholly beyond the reach of military justice. On the other hand, if Toth wins his freedom from the Air Force, he will probably never stand trial, since the case is clearly outside the jurisdiction of any civil court. For Toth, a long series of courtroom struggles and appeals lies ahead, and the end could bring him anything from scot-freedom to death before a firing squad...