{"id":76894,"date":"2018-01-03T10:05:41","date_gmt":"2018-01-03T15:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=76894"},"modified":"2018-01-03T10:05:41","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T15:05:41","slug":"prosecutors-awol-on-stolen-valor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=76894","title":{"rendered":"Prosecutors AWOL on Stolen Valor"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Times Free Press<\/a> talks to Mary Schantag of the POW Network on the subject of the rarity of prosecutions of stolen valor cases;<\/p>\n

Schantag said she has seen close to 100 cases in which false information got into military records, whether through self-editing, intimidation of a clerk who handled documents or other means.<\/p>\n

“Unless there are orders for this someplace, unless [the claimant] has witnesses, it’s still questionable,” she said.<\/p>\n

Violation of the Stolen Valor Act is punishable by a fine and up to a year in prison. The problem is finding a federal agency with the resources and staffing to devote to the cases, Schantag said.<\/p>\n

“They’re not going to drop their work on terrorism because we’ve got a guy claiming eight Purple Hearts,” Schantag said. “It’s common sense. That’s reality. But the state level may have the ability to pick that up. It’s a federal crime in most instances, falsifying military records but it pales in comparison to the level of other crimes going on that the FBI has to go after.”<\/p>\n

Several states have stolen valor laws on the books, including Alabama, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas, according to news reports.<\/p>\n

Schantag’s voice began to break when she described her passion for the issue.<\/p>\n

“It is to make sure our military history and the lives lost to fight for freedom, to make sure those things are accurately told,” she said. “These liars are changing military history and if you think about it, 50 to 100 years from now, who’s going to be able to figure out the truth or a lie?”<\/p>\n

Stolen valor takes away from those who spilled blood and, in some cases, lost their lives, she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Times Free Press became interested in the issue when they published the story of Steven Holloway<\/a> the self-proclaimed “most-decorated veteran of the Vietnam War”. It looks like he “salted” his records before he left the military, in other words, somehow he altered his records so that the supply clerk in a Transportation unit, became an often-wounded hero who landed a helicopter when the pilot was killed. We’ve seen that happen often, but we’ve only seen one guy prosecuted, and ultimately convicted for altering his records. Robert Brooks<\/a> was sentenced to five years probation in Davenport, Iowa.<\/p>\n

I know the FBI is investigating at least one other, having talked to the investigator recently, but, yeah, those investigations are rare. The states have been much more successful prosecuting valor thieves, like New Jersey’s prosecution of Robert Guidi<\/a>, and Georgia’s prosecution of Shane Ladner<\/a> last year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Times Free Press talks to Mary Schantag of the POW Network on the subject of … Prosecutors AWOL on Stolen Valor<\/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":[183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stolen-valor-act"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76894","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=76894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}