{"id":30408,"date":"2012-06-15T19:31:53","date_gmt":"2012-06-15T23:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=30408"},"modified":"2012-06-15T19:32:35","modified_gmt":"2012-06-15T23:32:35","slug":"outrage-over-the-johnson-verdict-no-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=30408","title":{"rendered":"Outrage over the Johnson verdict? No way!"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t heard, Col. James H. Johnson III, the former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, who we’ve discussed twice in the last few days<\/a> was sentenced in his trial for forgery, fraud, lying and bigamy yesterday. He got a wrist slap of a $300,000 fine for his plea of guilty to 13 charges and conviction on two others. Johnson keeps his rank, his current pay and his retirement.<\/p>\n

Well, Stars & Stripes<\/a> discovered that some folks are outraged over the little pat on Johnson’s rump the court calls punishment;<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce again, it appears there are two different standards for officers and enlisted in the Army,\u201d [Greg Rinckey, a former Army judge advocate general] said. \u201cIf this had been an enlisted soldier, you have to believe there would have been a reduction in rank and jail time. And that perception of different rules does become a problem.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Fidell said the verdict appeared mainly to be an attempt to protect the family that Johnson left behind.<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously they wanted to preserve his pension so that his wife \u2014 one of his wives, anyway, the legal wife \u2014 could get the benefit,\u201d [Eugene Fidell, military law expert who teaches at Yale University] said.<\/p>\n

In some cases, the court-martial panel feels the need to send a loud and clear message, but this likely wasn\u2019t one of them, Fidell said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a freakish case,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to have to worry about an upsurge in bigamy as a result of this.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, I’m sure they were thinking of Johnson’s first wife, but how much would they take into consideration a wife of a sergeant guilty of that much malfeasance? I think it’s the greatest miscarriage of justice in the history of military justice. The thing is that Johnson wasn’t thinking about the welfare of his first wife, so why should Big Army consider it? Because it’s not their money they’re giving her – it’s the taxpayers’ money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t heard, Col. James H. Johnson III, the former commander of the 173rd Airborne … Outrage over the Johnson verdict? No way!<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[198,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-army","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}