Category: Stolen Valor Act

The Allentown/Lehigh Valley Morning Call writes that Bucks County Lawmakers want to apply gun control laws to the purchase of military awards. Of course, there are already laws against being a phony soldier, but, as with gun control laws, prosecutors don’t want to do their jobs, so lawmakers want to write even more laws to make up for incompetent and lazy government employees.

Sean Schafer, policy director for state Sen. Tommy Tomlinson, R-Bucks, and Dan Fraley, Bucks County’s director of Veterans Affairs, agree. They plan to do something about it, too.

Schafer pointed out that civilians may treat perceived military members differently based on their appearance. He is investigating possible legislation to restrict Pennsylvania civilians’ ability to buy military honors.

“If we forbid stolen valor, why do we allow people to sell stolen valor?” Schafer said.

There are no regulations on the sale of military items such as the 30 or so military ribbons, badges and awards, including those awarded for valor. That means authentic military uniforms, badges, medals and other military accessories, including Purple Hearts and Silver Stars, are sold in surplus Army/Navy stores and online. Good replica awards are enough to fool most civilians, military officials said.

So, I guess there’s going to be a series of background check laws that will only affect legal valor owners. It will create an illegal trade that will only add to the excitement of stolen valor as the valor thieves buy their third award of the CIB out of the trunk of a car in a dark parking lot. Or the less adventurous will just purchase their HALO wings from an overseas pirate website. And there will also be the Gun Show loophole that will have to be closed.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that some dealers in the valor trade already self-police and don’t sell to valor thieves, like our friends at My Service Pride.

We can continue to write more laws to prevent the purchase of illegal awards and badges…or we can make the prosecutors do their f***ing jobs. I guess it just makes us feel better to write more stupid laws than expect people to do the jobs that they’re hired to do.

Someone sent us a link to yet another article from our northern cousins about some Stolen Valor thieves they have busted recently;

Police say a member of the military questioned Eric Janssens as he marched at a laying-of-the-wreaths ceremony in Orono on Nov. 9. The soldier became suspicious after Janssens’ answers about his service weren’t consistent with his medals, police said.

An investigation revealed Janssens also took part in a similar ceremony in nearby Newtonville on Nov. 8 and at the Bowmanville Remembrance Day ceremony on Nov. 11, police said.

[…]

In January, David Dodd, former co-sergeant-at-arms of the Peterborough, Ontario legion, made false claims on the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Association Facebook group. He claimed to be a former member of the regiment and said a female soldier died in his arms during combat overseas and that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

But Dodd was never a member of the regiment, never served overseas and wasn’t entitled to wear the military medals he’d been photographed with at local legion events.

Since it was the police who told the reporter about Janssens, I have to assume that he’s facing charges, but Dodd apologized to his legion commander and they let it go. He’ll probably back at it. The Canadians have those great stolen valor laws, they should use them.

Former Marine Elven Swisher told the Veterans Affairs Department that he had been wounded on a secret mission into China or North Korea in 1957, that he had been awarded a secret Purple Heart for the wounds, but that he’d been told to keep it quiet. As a result, he collected a few thousand bucks in disability pay, until the VA discovered that no such “off the books” operation took place. Swisher was convicted of the lie in 2007.

At his trial, the Marine Corp testified that Swisher hadn’t been injured during his service and the prosecutor presented the court with photos of him wearing the Purple Heart and a Silver Star. He was sentenced to a year in jail and three years of supervised release.

Following in the foot steps of Xavier Alvarez, Swisher appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit on the grounds that he was denied his First Amendment rights, according to Courthouse News.

Swisher presented similar arguments [to Alvarez], but U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Boise denied his petition. A unanimous appellate panel agreed on Wednesday, though one judge argued that the ruling is based on a bad but unavoidable law.

The panel based its decision not on Alvarez but on the 9th Circuit’s 2012 ruling United States v. Perelman, which the high court declined to review. In that case, the appellate court “interpreted § 704(a) as criminalizing ‘the unauthorized wearing of medals only when the wearer intends to deceive.’”

The government’s “extensive evidence that Swisher was not entitled to wear those medals, as no military record documented the awards or Swisher’s claimed combat injuries,” proved at trial that Swisher had intended to deceive by wearing the unauthorized medals, the three-judge panel found.

“Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that Swisher wore the medals for the purpose of claiming that he was ‘worthy of commendation,’ when in fact he was not,” Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote for the panel. “Given Perelman’s conclusion that the First Amendment does not prevent Congress from criminalizing the act of wearing military medals without authorization and with an intent to deceive, Swisher’s constitutional challenge to his conviction under § 704(a) fails.”

David Perelman had claimed that a self-inflicted gun shot wound was a war injury from his time in Vietnam and he collected about $180,000 in disability payments. He, of course, was convicted and used the same language as Alvarez claiming that his fraud was free speech, but the court disagreed because the Alvarez case defended “pure speech” but Perelman, and now Swisher, included fraud.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think I got all of that right.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke to the 2014 Congressional Medal of Honor Society Awards gala in Knoxville, TN the other day. As one of the minority of the USSC who voted in favor of the Stolen Valor Act of 2004, Alito urged Congress to strengthen Stolen Valor Laws;

“I fervently wish that we find a way, that Congress will find a way to protect the integrity of our country’s system of military honors,” Justice Alito said, making a comparison to laws cracking down on counterfeit luxury goods. “If there is no First Amendment right to buy a fake Rolex, why should there be a First Amendment right to wear a fake Medal of Honor?” he said at the ceremony.

While I agree with the Supreme Court’s decision that the Stolen Valor Act could probably be used to squelch free speech, and while I agree that “the remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true”, I’ve also seen that there are no protections for the people who do the “speech that is true” thing. Several of the people reading this right now are victims of the litigious creature in Oregon who thinks that he can sue us into making him a Chief Petty Officer.

Last year, we were victimized by another creature who hired a hitman for $14,000/month to get this blog removed from the internet so he could be a phony SEAL and a phony Indian. As many of you heard in the recording of my conversation with the State Police, there are no protections for our own free speech. Prosecutors are less willing to prosecute valor thieves than they are willing to prosecute those of us who speak the truth based on lies and fabrications.

The old POW Network was litigated into obscurity, not because anything Mary and Chuck Schantag put on that website was false, but because they were victimized by a litigious phony with a law degree. Phonies can post websites jam-packed with lies about us, but let us tell the absolute truth about them, their own actions, their own false stories and we’re victimized by the police, prosecutors and judges.

What we do only has value to the veteran community, because the cretins who claim valor that they didn’t earn make us look bad, usually because they are guilty of other crimes besides just stealing valor and they use their pretend experiences in the military as an excuse for their bad behavior. But, the fact remains that we’re not able to enforce our community’s standards alone and in this case we need some sort of government intervention, since we can’t get the support of our local law enforcement community.

Added; Some guy at The Burn Pit agrees.

ChipNASA sends a link to the press release from the Connecticut Governor, Dannel P. Malloy announcing that he has signed that state’s Stolen Valor legislation;

“Misrepresenting oneself as having served in our military for your own profit is not only disrespectful, but selfish and cannot be tolerated,” said Governor Malloy. “Serving in our military is an incredibly honorable act. Especially as our country prepares to observe Memorial Day this weekend, we should take this opportunity to reflect on the generations of men and women who have fought to make our nation a better, stronger place.”

The crime remains punishable by up to six months in jail, a fine between $500 and $1,000, or both.

“Our military men and women and their families have made tremendous sacrifices for us. It is important that we take every opportunity to assist our veterans in all the ways we can,” said Lt. Governor Nancy Wyman. “Ensuring housing, healthcare, and job training are a big part of protecting our veterans, but this legislation makes it clear we will also defend the very titles they have fought so hard to earn.”

Special attention should be given to this paragraph;

“When I was an active member in the military, I was prepared to go into a combat zone to give up my life to defend our nation’s freedoms – that was an oath taken very seriously,” said State Representative Jack Hennessy (D-Bridgeport), co-chair of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “People that walk around pretending to be in the military, or pretending to have served, disrespect those who have actually served and those that have made the ultimate sacrifice.”

Jack Hennessy is indeed an Army Ranger – he was my roomie nearly 40 years ago. The Gregory Banks story got him involved in the stole valor issue. Last year, someone reported Jack to me because they thought he was a phony, so we reconnected through that incident. It’s too bad that the legislation was passed too late to hammer Banks or his little cabana boy over the head with it.