Circus Trial Looms Over Military Sex Assault Reform

The court-martial of Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair — who is accused of sexual assault, among other charges — already seems to be going off the rails.

The lead prosecutor, Lt. Col. William Helixon, left the case last month following an apparent nervous breakdown. On Tuesday, Sinclair’s lawyers said that Helixon told them over the phone that he believed the accuser behind the most serious assault charges had lied in a pre-trial hearing, but that he felt pressured by commanders to pursue the case. In the same hearing, a fellow officer described Helixon as an emotional wreck on the night before the phone call in question, and said that he wasn't fit for duty.

The trial has become a sideshow to a more important event that could take place as early as 2 PM on Thursday: a Senate vote on the Military Justice Improvement Act (MJIA). Sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), the bill seeks to shift authority over reports of sexual assault in the military from the chain of command to independent military prosecutors, in order to eliminate any conflict of interest.

“In the military, the accused’s commander serves as the Convening Authority, the person with the ultimate power to decide whether a case should go to court-martial and appoint the jury,” Nancy Parrish, the head of Protect Our Defenders, which supports victims of sexual assault in the military, told VICE News. “This is an inherently conflicted, often biased, and inefficient system.”

Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) helped draft the bill.

“We don’t send our military into battle with a blunderbuss,” Greg Jacobs, SWAN's policy director, told VICE News. “They have the best technology available. They deserve the best legal system.”

“We’re not arguing that the commander shouldn’t be involved, we’re arguing for the best qualified individual to render a decision. That’s the JAG,” said Jacobs. JAG, or Judge Advocate General’s Corps, is the justice branch of the military, independent of the chain of command.

Before a Senate panel last month, former service members who had been sexually assaulted described reporting the crime to their commanders as a torment. “It could be a perpetrator in your chain of command,” said retired Lance Cpl. Jeremiah Arbogast. “In my case, it was my previous supervisor.”

Despite overwhelming evidence, he said, the military court found his rapist guilty of lesser charges. “I was formally retired from the US Marine Corps due to military sexual trauma and PTSD,” said Arbogast. “I joined the Marines in order to serve my country as an honorable man. Instead, I was thrown away like a piece of garbage.”

Gillibrand, who chaired the panel, tweeted afterward:

While 1 in 10 Iraq & Afghanistan vets who deployed multiple times have PTSD, 4 in 10 survivors of military sexual trauma experience PTSD.

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand)February 26, 2014

“Commanders do not investigate this crime,” Lt. Col. Cathy Wilkinson, a Pentagon spokesperson, told VICE News. “That is the job of independent military criminal investigators. Victims do not have to report this crime to their commander.”

But Gillibrand’s fact sheet on the issue notes that all claims end up on the desk of the victim’s commander, “who becomes the sole decision maker over whether a case moves forward.”

Parrish said that 25 percent of sexual assaults are committed by someone in the victim’s chain of command. “Your boss or his friends should not decide whether a sexual assault investigation is prosecuted,” she said. “It's common sense.”

According to a Pentagon survey released last year, an estimated 26,000 active-duty service members experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact in 2012. The Pentagon uses the phrase “unwanted sexual contact” to include sexual assault, aggravated sexual contact, and forcible sodomy.

The Pentagon received only 3,374 reports of sexual assault that year.

Photo by Justin Connaher