Admiral Van Sice has no respect for the legal PROCESS.

Admiral James Van Sice has no respect for the legal PROCESS. He has no respect for the men and women who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of justice. He has no respect for the men and women who have toiled faithfully to ensure that the Coast Guard military justice has an appearance of professionalism. Moreover, he has no respect for Cadet Webster Smith, who was framed, railroaded, held incommunicado, and languishes in a cold prison cell waiting for him to approve or disapprove his prison sentence.
Admiral Thad W. Allen, Commandant of the Coast Guard, speaking at the Academy on 8 September 2006 did not mention the Webster Smith Case. But, talking with reporters afterward, Allen said THE PROCESS used to deal with the issue worked as it should.
Apparently, Commandant Allen did not know that the PROCESS is stalled. He did not seem to be aware that his fellow Admiral, the Superintendent, was stonewalling the PROCESS.
This is un-American. It is not in keeping with the highest traditions of Coast Guard officers. What has happened to the leaders of the Coast Guard Academy? Why won’t they do their job? This is dereliction of duty. It amounts to gross malfeasance in office.
Webster Smith is not an enemy of this country. He is not an American enemy combattant like John Philip Walker Lindhl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_Lindh) captured on the field of battle in Afghanistan fighting with the Taliban. He should not need the Geneva Convention to get his boss to do his job. He should not need a Writ of Haebeas Corpus to rescue him from a cold, dark prison cell.
It appears that the best friend Webster Smith has working in the military justice system is Father Time. Father Time has the key to Webster Smith’s jail cell. He was sentenced to 6 months in jail. It has been over 5 months and the trial record and the Convening Authority’s approval of the Record of Trial and the sentence imposed has not been approved or disapproved. Father Time is about to take action. Time marches on and Admiral Sice refuses to march to the beat of his drum. Time will not wait for Admiral Van Sice.



What happened to the Academy military justice machine that geared up to convict an innocent man accused of raping his girlfriend, the first female Regimental Commander in 7 years? Is the military justice system in the Coast Guard on hold? Is it permanently out-to-lunch? Is it slow to act like its parent agency was slow to act in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort because the convicted cadet is Black?
The Webster Smith case grows more bizarre every day. More and more it begins to look like the Trial of the Scottsboro Boys. This case will live in infamy along with the Dred Scott Decision and the Scottsboro Boys.

Webster Smith and the Scottsboro Boys.

No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine Black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the Scottsboro Boys, as the Black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, wasted lives and produced heroes.
No one deserves more blame for the long ordeal suffered by the Scottsboro Boys than does a lower class white woman from Huntsville named Victoria Price. It was her accusation of gang rape aboard a Chattanooga to Memphis freight train, repeated in trial after trial for six years, that led to one of the most protracted and tumultuous legal battles in American history.
Price was the promiscuous, hard drinking, hard swearing daughter of a Huntsville widow who lived in a poor, racially mixed section of town. She made love in box cars and fields, slept in hobo jungles, and rode the rails in a pair of beaten overalls. A defense affidavit of a one-time neighbor of Price's described her as a common street prostitute of the lowest type, a woman who would be out at all hours of the night and curse and swear, and be a general nuisance to the Black population. Another acquaintance rounded up by the defense said he saw Price drunk and in a fight with another woman and she had her clothes up around her body and she had on only two garments, and exposed her private parts. A third acquaintance swore he had overheard Price asking Black men the size of their private parts.
Ruby Bates was, like Victoria Price, a poor Huntsville millworker who became one of the two accusers of the Scottsboro Boys. But, unlike Price, Bates later recanted her story of rape aboard a Chattanooga to Memphis freight train, and went on to actively campaign for the release of the jailed black defendants.
Bates had a tough childhood. Her mother was a prostitute. Her father was a shiftless drunk who would beat her, her mother, and her siblings. When her father was jailed for horse-whipping her brother, the family left and began to move from one northern Alabama town to another before settling in Huntsville, where, at age fifteen, Ruby took a job in the Margaret cotton mill. Bates lived with her family in an unpainted wooden shack in worst part of Huntsville. Her family was the only white family on the block. Contrary to popular belief, segregation did not reach to the lower rungs of southern society, and Ruby lived, played, and slept with Blacks.
Bates was frequently described as a notorious prostitute. A defense affidavit of a resident of Chattanooga, where Bates rented a room for a time in a boarding house, stated that Bates often had Black men in her room all night, and would sleep with as many as three men in an afternoon.
As a prosecution witness in the first trials in Scottsboro, Bates proved to be much less effective that the brasher and more confidant Price. Shy, inarticulate, and insecure, Bates was a poor liar. Moreover, she could not identify any of her attackers and failed to corroborate Price on key points of her testimony.
Bates was a surprise witness for the defense in the second Haywood Patterson trial. She recanted her story of the rape, saying she was encouraged by Price to make the false accusation as a way of deflecting attention from possible charges of vagrancy or Mann Act (crossing state lines for immoral purposes) that they otherwise may have faced when they were among those rounded up by the posse in Paint Rock.
After the trial, Bates headed northeast and joined the Defense campaign for release of the Scottsboro Boys.

JUSTICE DELAYED is JUSTICE DENIED. But, It's Better Late Than Never!!

Alabama's parole board granted posthumous pardons Thursday, 21 November 2013, in the notorious "Scottsboro Boys" case of the 1930s, which became a potent symbol of racial injustice and led to landmark legal decisions.

The three men pardoned— Charles Weems, Andy Wright and Haywood Patterson —were among nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama in 1931. Within weeks, eight were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries in Scottsboro, Ala., amid a racially charged atmosphere. The judge declared a mistrial for 13-year-old Roy Wright.

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(Four of the defendants in the `Scottsboro Boys' case are led into a Decatur, Ala., courtroom on April 6, 1933.AP)

What ensued was a yearslong legal battle that included three rounds of trials. The men spent varying amounts of time in prison, but all eventually were paroled, pardoned or freed. The last defendant died in 1989.

The Scottsboro case triggered outrage and protests that some consider a precursor to the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. It reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice, yielding significant rulings on the right to legal counsel and the exclusion of Blacks from juries. It inspired songs, books, poetry and even a Broadway musical in 2010.

"We're real proud that it's over with," said state Rep. John Robinson, a Democrat from Scottsboro. "It was one of the grossest injustices that has ever been done in this country."

Activists and historians have long pressed the state to pardon the defendants and commemorate their case, said Rev. Robert Shanklin, a pastor who serves on the executive committee of the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center.

In April, Alabama lawmakers unanimously passed a measure to allow the state's Board of Pardons & Paroles to grant posthumous pardons to the Scottsboro defendants. A petition seeking the pardons was signed by all the circuit judges and district attorneys in the two counties where the defendants were convicted. The board found that five of the defendants were ineligible under the law because their convictions had been overturned and charges against them dropped in 1937. A sixth, Clarence Norris, was pardoned by Gov. George Wallace in 1976. The board unanimously voted to pardon the three remaining defendants.

"Clearly, it's just long, long, long overdue," said James A. Miller, an American studies professor at George Washington University (GWU) and author of a book about the Scottsboro cases. He lamented that the pardons came too late for the defendants, whose lives were ruined. But he said he hoped the board's actions would "generate deeper and widespread interest, not only in the case, but in the historic vagaries of American justice."

Those who pushed for the pardons said they hoped the actions would help the state close a searing chapter in its history. "We are a long way from where we were in the '30s in Alabama," said Glenn Thompson, a circuit judge in Morgan County, Ala., who was among those who petitioned the parole board for the pardons. "It's largely a symbolic gesture at this point, but it's better late than never."

(Wall Street Journal; Campo-Flores, Arian and McWhirter, Cameron)

If the PROCESS had worked, Webster Smith would be free today.

Admiral Thad W. Allen, Commandant of the Coast Guard, speaking at the Academy on 8 September 2006 did not mention the Webster Smith Case. But, talking with reporters afterward, Allen said THE PROCESS used to deal with the issue worked as it should, and said he was not worried about the academy’s reputation being soiled by the incident.
An accused has some legal protection afforded through the PROCESS. They are, among others, the presumption of innocence, the right to remain silent, and the right to confront and to challenge the witnesses against him.

If the PROCESS had worked as it should, Webster Smith would never have been convicted. Even a kangaroo court-martial would not have convicted Webster Smith based on the evidence available. If the Defense Team had had the desire, the time, and the money to investigate every witness on the prosecution’s list of witnesses, they would have found enough evidence to destroy the prosecution’s two star witnesses, Kristen Nicholson and Shelly Raudenbush. They would have found enough character against Shelly Raudenbush to impeach her credibility.
As it turns out, the only crime of note that Webster Smith was convicted of concerned Shelly Raudenbush. Without physical evidence of any sort, the trial came down to a classical case of he-said versus she-said. It was Webster Smith’s word against Shelly Raudenbush, and the jury chose to believe Shelly. If they had known anything about Shelly, they would not have.
If the Defense had looked into Shelly’s past, they would have found hard evidence to impeach her credibility as a witness. Webster Smith would have been the more credible witness.
Shelly was given a free ride at trial. The very secret that Webster Smith was supposed to be keeping for her was about a sex crime that she had committed. She had been spreading the wealth with the Navy boys in Virginia the previous summer. In high school she was a liberated woman, who took her pleasures wherever she found them. She was not loyal or true to her boyfriends. Like her primary caregivers and role models, she did not hate herself the next morning; and she could still look herself in the mirror. She was not a virtuous woman in the traditional sense of the word; yet, at trial, she was accorded the status of a paragon of virtue.
A talk with any of the boys in the Council Rock Class of 2002 would have proven very enlightening. If the Defense had just looked, they would have found numerous witnesses ready to testify concerning her reputation, life style, and pattern of behavior that would have raised much more than reasonable doubt about her credibility and testimony. Once her credibility had been thoroughly impeached, Webster Smith would have been the more credible witness.
If the PROCESS had worked as it should, Webster Smith would be a free man today.
This case will live in infamy with the Dred Scott Decision and the Scottsboro Boys as monuments to injustice and abuse of the judicial process.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces

450 E Street, Northwest

Washington, D.C. 20442-0001



SCHEDULED HEARINGS




United States v. Webster M. Smith, No. 08-0719/CG

(Appellee) (Appellant)



Counsel for Appellant: Ronald C. Machen, Esq.

Counsel for Appellee: LT Emily P. Reuter, USCG



Case Summary: GCM conviction of going from place of duty, attempting to disobey an order, sodomy, extortion, and indecent assault. Granted issue questions whether the military judge violated Appellant’s constitutional right to confront his accusers by limiting his cross-examination of [SR], the government’s only witness, on three of the five charges.



NOTE: Counsel for each side will be allotted 20 minutes to present oral argument in this case.

First Female Academy Graduate Dies in Iraq.

First Black West Point Commander Dies In Iraq

The nation is mourning the death of Lt. Emily Perez, 23, the first Black woman to serve as corps commander sergeant major at West Point . Perez, who graduated in the top 10 percent of her class, out-ran many men, directed a gospel choir, read the Bible every day. She also headed a weekly convoy as it rolled down treacherous roads, packed with bombs and bullets near Najaf , Iraq . As platoon leader, she ins isted on leading her troops from the front. She died Sept. 12 when a bomb detonated near her Humvee in Kifl, south of Baghdad . Shortly before shipping out to Iraq with the 204th Support Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, she flew cross-country to be a bone marrow donor for a stranger who was a match. She was the 64th woman from the U.S. military to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.







A celebrity is a widely-recognized or famous person who commands a high degree of public and media attention. While fame is generally considered a necessary precondition for celebrity status, it is not always sufficient. There has to be a level of public interest in the person, which may or may not be connected to the reason they are famous.
A public figure such as a politician or CEO may be famous, but they may not become a celebrity unless public and mass media interest is piqued. For example Virgin Director Richard Branson was famous as a CEO, but he did not become a celebrity until he attempted to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon). On the other hand, mass entertainment personalities such as soap opera actors or country music stars are likely to become celebrities even if the person deliberately avoids media attention.
Generally, a hero is defined in mythology and legend, is a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.




Also, a person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life, as soldiers and nurses who are heroes in an unpopular war.
Today, too many celebrities are marketed as heroes.
Lt. Emily Perez was a real hero.