Politically-Incorrect Dissent on Rape in the Military

There has been a lot of media attention recently on rape victims and the prevalence of rape in the military.  As some of the individuals retell their stories, it is clear to see that they suffered from a traumatic experience.  However, being in the military myself, and a former military prosecutor no less, I do not share the opinion that there is an “epidemic” in our ranks.  Does sexual assault occur in the military?  Absolutely.  But does it occur at a rate any higher than what you might find on an average college campus or in the public writ large?  No.  And when sexual assault allegations arise, are commanders sweeping them under the proverbial rug?  Certainly not!

One of the major differences in the military justice system versus the state criminal justice system, is that the District Attorneys in the states can evaluate the allegations, and if they decide that the case lacks prosecutorial merit, they can refuse to present the case to a grand jury for an indictment.  Another major difference is if the grand jury says there isn’t enough evidence, the District Attorney can’t go forward.  Neither of these checks and balances are found in the military justice system.

Instead, unit commanders (called Convening Authorities - usually Colonels and higher) decide whether a case should proceed to trial.  For felony-level cases like sexual assault, they must first receive a recommendation from a neutral investigator, but the ultimate decision on whether to go forward with a case rests with the commander.

The neutral investigator (called an Article 32 Investigating Officer) hears the evidence that the government has against the defendant and makes a recommendation to the commander.  This sounds fair so far, but when the investigator recommends NOT going forward on a sexual assault case because of deficiencies in the evidence, all too often the commander is faced with a dilemma: dismiss the charges as recommended or forward the charges to a General Court-Martial.  The easiest decision is to send it forward.

But can you blame them?  What are the commanders supposed to do when the deafening chorus of politicians and news anchors are calling for more accountability for "rapists" in the military?  Does anyone really expect a commander (typically a rising star in the military) to risk their professional future by refusing to send a rape allegation to trial and face being labeled by the media as “hiding rapists” or being “soft on sexual assault?” No way!  They are going to take the easy way out.  The politically palatable way out.  They are going to kick the can down the road to the prosecutor and let him take the case to trial, warts and all, under the guise of letting “the military justice system runs its course.”

Please do not read this to say that I think all sexual assault allegations in the military have no prosecutorial merit.  Many do.  But can we ever expect the commander to make the hard call to dismiss a case when it lacks merit?  Not any more.  And then when the prosecutors do their very best with a case that would have never gone to trial in a state system, we ask: Why can’t you get the conviction?  The prosecutors may possess the trial skills of Perry Mason or Clarence Darrow, but they can’t change the facts of the case, the rules of evidence, or the burden of proof.  These cases are seldom black and white.  And in a Constitutional system that requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, convictions are (and should be) hard to come by.

With all of this going on (our focus on the victims), what is baffling to me, is that we are forgetting about the accused.  What happened to “innocent until proven guilty?” Congress is asking for more convictions; going so far to change the military sexual assault laws in a shameless effort to secure more convictions, while, the accused is labeled a rapist before even having his day in court.  This is terrible and antithetical to our criminal justice system.  We can’t simply jettison the Constitution when it is politically appealing.

McClatchy put out a pretty good article on this issue last week (LINK).  Of the many the media outlets that have focused on this issue, they are the only one, in my opinion, that has its priorities straight.  Sometimes justice means that a person is convicted of sexual assault.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  But this prejudgment of military defendants (or any defendants) has to stop.  By law, an accused is innocent until a verdict of guilty is returned and no sooner.

Military Sex Crime Conviction May Be Used for Enhancement in Texas

Rushing v. State (Tex.Crim.App. - Oct 5, 2011) - Here's a case that interests me on a couple of levels.  When I was a prosecutor in the Marine Corps, one of the constant questions I received from defense counsel when negotiating a plea on a sex crime case was how, and to what extent, the conviction will affect the service member in his/her home state.  I rarely knew the answer because many of the accused were from different states.  Well, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has confirmed that a military conviction for a sex crime, does have collateral consequences in Texas - one of them being that the conviction is able to be used for enhancement purposes in a later prosecution for a separate offense.

In Rushing, the CCA held that a prior sex-offense conviction under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) qualifies as a "conviction under the laws of another state" for enhancement purposes.  Texas Government Code §311.005(7) defines "state" to include any area subject to the legislative authority of the United States.  A UCMJ conviction is deemed to have taken place on United States soil and the defendant's subsequent conviction is properly enhanced under Penal Code §12.42(c)(2)(b)(v) for that conviction.

Sentencing Range and Community Supervision Period Not Linked

The punishment range for a second-degree felony sexual assault is two-twenty years in prison. However, the minimum period of community supervision (i.e. probation) for the same offense is five years. So can a trial court award community supervision if the jury returns a punishment verdict of less than five years? Here’s how this situation played out down in Houston:

A jury found a defendant guilty of the second-degree felony of sexual assault. The jury sentenced the defendant to the minimum punishment (two years) and further recommended community supervision (a recommendation the trial judge is required to take). The trial judge, however, informed the jury that its verdict was illegal because the minimum period of community supervision is five years. The trial court essentially instructed the jury that if it wanted to recommend community supervision, it must sentence the defendant to at least five years (which would then be probated). Following instructions, the jury went back and returned a verdict of five years with a recommendation for community supervision.

Was the trial court correct in his instructions to the jury?

NO, says the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Mayes v. State.

There is nothing in Article 42.12 (Tex. Code Crim. Proc.) that states, or even suggests, that the jury must assess a sentence that equals the minimum period of community supervision, the maximum period, or any particular period in between. The jury does not determine the period of community supervision. It assesses the sentence and recommends that the trial judge place the defendant on community supervision. The judge must follow that recommendation, but he has the discretion to determine the appropriate period of supervision, as long as it within the minimum and maximum statutory period.

The CCA opinion makes clear that the statutory minimums for punishment and community supervision are not inextricably linked.

[A] rule that a jury cannot assess the minimum sentence in a case if it also wants the defendant to serve that sentence on community supervision would lead to an absurd result.

Accordingly, the CCA reversed the judgment of the court of appeals.

A Simple Truth (Revisited)

In September of 2010, the 3rd Court of Appeals (Austin) reversed the sexual assault conviction of Mark Barshaw because the trial court allowed the following testimony of an MHMR expert regarding the truthfulness of mentally retarded individuals:

It's been my experience that folks with mental retardation can be painfully honest, really. I mean, it's like a little kid who looks at somebody and says in the supermarket, 'You're really old,' or, you know, whatever little kids do.

See our prior post HERE.  The State appealed the 3rd Court’s reversal and now, in an opinion released on 29 June 2011, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the Court of Appeals.

Apparently troubled by the less-than-thorough harm analysis conducted by the lower court, the CCA explained:

Even in cases in which credibility is paramount, Texas courts have found harmless error when the inadmissible expert testimony was only a small portion of a large amount of evidence presented that the jury could have considered in assessing the victim’s credibility. Upon reviewing the record as a whole, we find that additional evidence exists that should have been considered in the court of appeals’s harm analysis, as is required by [our previous caselaw].

With that, the CCA remanded the case back to the 3rd Court of Appeals to conduct a full harm analysis. A shot across the bow perhaps? I think the odds are heavily in favor of the Court of Appeals changing its mind on this one. We’ll see.

A Simple Truth: Sexual Assault Conviction Reversed for Improper Expert Testimony

It's been my experience that folks with mental retardation can be painfully honest, really.  I mean, it's like a little kid who looks at somebody and says in the supermarket, 'You're really old,' or, you know, whataver little kids do.

That was part of the testimony of an MHMR expert at the sexual assault trial of Mark Barshaw.  Barshaw was accused of sexually assaulting a mentally retarded victim, who was 21 years-old at the time, but functioned at approxiamtely a 10 year-old level.  Upon hearing this testimony, the defense counsel objected, "You can't have somebody come in and testify to a class of people are truthful."  The State responded by stating that it was simply trying to show how mentally retarded persons "adapt" and that the testimony also went to show that "she's incapable of either appraising the the situation or the nature of the act."  The trial judge allowed the testimony to continue.

...again, it's been my experience in the hundreds and hundreds of people with mental retardation that I've seen, that it's more going to be that they're painfully honest.  They haven't learned the social skills and probably never will to know when you should lie or when it would be socially appropriate to not tell the truth because it might hurt someone's feelings, or things of that nature, to hold things back.

In allowing the testimony of the MHMR expert, the trial judge abused its discretion, said the 3rd District Court of Appeals (Austin).  The Court explained that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held that evidence rule 702 "does not permit an expert to give an opinion that the complainant or a class of persons to which the complainant belongs is truthful."  Yount v. State, 872 S.W.2d 706, 712 (Tex. Crim. App. 1993).  Such an expert, is essentially telling the jury that they can believe the victim in the instant case.  This, held the CCA, "is not 'expert' testimony of the kind which will assist the jury under rule 702."  Id. at 711.

The Court also cited the CCA case Schutz v. State.  957 S.W.2d 52 (Tex. Crim. App. 1977).  In Schatz, the CCA explained that:

children and mentally retarded persons are viewed by society as "impaired." When such a witness is expected to testify, expert testimony should be permitted in the offering party’s case in chief concerning the ability of the class of persons suffering the "impairment" to distinguish reality from fantasy and to perceive, remember, and relate the kinds of events at issue in the case.  The court emphasized that such testimony should be limited to the “impaired” class’s ability to accurately relate events and should not extend to the class’s tendency to do so; the latter would violate the holding in Yount.

Id. at 70 (emphasis added).  Having violated the CCA holdings in Yount and Schutz by allowing the expert to testify that mentally retarded persons are, as a class, truthful, the Court found harm and reversed the sexual assault conviction.

Justice Henson dissented and would have held that there was no harm in the trial judge's erroneous ruling.

Texas Pick 'Em; No Jury Unanimity In Continuing Child Sexual Abuse Cases

The issue of jury unanimity in Texas felony cases is a complicated area of the law.  TDCAA published a good article on the subject a couple of years ago.  Simply speaking, Texas criminal law generally requires a unanimous jury verdict wherein the all members of the jury agree on the elements of the offense.  A bit of a wrench is thrown into this system when we consider the offense of "continuous sexual abuse of a young child or children" under section 21.02 of the Texas Penal Code.

Under section 21.02, a jury is not required to agree unanimously on which specific acts of sexual abuse were committed by the defendant or the exact date when those acts were committed.  Specifically, subsection (d) of 21.01 provides:

If a jury is the trier of fact, members of the jury are not required to agree unanimously on which specific acts of sexual abuse were committed by the defendant or the exact date when those acts were committed. The jury must agree unanimously that the defendant, during a period that is 30 or more days in duration, committed two or more acts of sexual abuse.

Arguably, allowing jurors to simply pick and choose which instances (2 or more) of abuse they believe the State proved beyond a reasonable doubt without requiring that they all agree on the specific instances "undermines the weight or effect of [Texas's] rules for the mere purposes of returning a verdict."  This was the argument of Richard Michael Reckart in his appeal of his conviction to the 13th District Court of Appeals.

With a wave of the hand, the 13th Court dismissed Reckart's claim, holding:

Reckart, however, does not cite any cases that support his claim that the right to an impartial jury under the Federal or State Constitution includes the right to a unanimous jury, and we have found none. See Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404, 411-12 (1972) (plurality agreeing that in state criminal prosecution, less than unanimous verdict did not violate Sixth Amendment right to impartial jury); see also State v. Espinoza, No. 05-09-01260-CR, 2010 WL 2598982, at *3 (Tex. App.–Dallas June 30, 2010, pet. filed) (not designated for publication).

I guess I should know as well as anyone that there is no Constitutional right to a unanimous jury verdict, because we in the military justice system do not require such in any case except those involving the death penalty case (sentencing phase).  It just seems to me that if we, as a State, are going to require a unanimous jury verdict, that the requirement should be consistent as applied the the underlying offenses in a continuous abuse case.  If the jurors cannot agree on which acts were committed, isn't that called "reasonable doubt?"

Retaliation and Assault

Below are a couple of published cases from the 7th (Amarillo) and 14th (Houston) Courts of Appeals regarding the sufficiency of an indictment and a jury charge, respectively.

Defect in Retaliation Indictment - Cada v. State, 7th District Court of Appeals (May 24, 2010)


In Cada, the appellant was indicted for and convicted of retaliation against a "witness" under Texas Penal Code Section 36.06.  Under prior Texas caselaw, the definition of "witness," as used in connection with the retaliation statute, means "one who had testified in an official proceeding."  In this case, however, the "witness" against whom the appellant was alleged to have retaliated, never testified in an official proceeding, but rather simply made a complaint to the police which resulted in appellant's wife being arrested.  The complainant, said the Court, was actually a "prospective witness," rather than an actual "witness" under the statute.  This variance in the indictment, the Court held, was not material.  Accordingly, the Court upheld the conviction for retaliation against a witness.


Defect in Jury Charge - Trejo v. State, 14th District Court of Appeals (May 20, 2010)


In Trejo, appellant was charged with aggravated sexual assault, but was convicted of aggravated assault as an LIO.  The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, however, held that aggravated assault was not an LIO of aggravated sexual assault in this case and remanded the case back to the 14th Court.  The Court was tasked to determine whether appellant suffered "egregious harm" based on the trial court's error in charging the jury on aggravated assault even though it was not an LIO of the indicted offense.

Egregious harm deprives appellant of a fair and impartial trial. Egregious harm occurs when the error affects the very basis of the case,‘ deprives the defendant of a valuable right,‘ or vitally affect[s] a defensive theory.  In the egregious-harm analysis, we consider (1) the charge itself, (2) the state of the evidence, including contested issues and the weight of the probative evidence, (3) arguments of counsel; and, (4) any other relevant information revealed by the trial record as a whole.

Applying the four Almanza factors above and using the common sense observation that Appellant was convicted of the very offense that was improperly charged to the jury, the Court held that Appellant did indeed suffer egregious harm and reversed his conviction.  

Undetected College Rapists

HERE is the link to an intersting article about college men who commit sexual assaults and go undetected and unprosecuted. The article, which mentions one student from a Texas university, is an eye-opener.