The Wright case moves towards trial
by Zachary D Spilman This blog is reposted from caaflog.com/2015/08/13/the-wright-case-moves-towards-trial/ |
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The Wright case is an Air Force sexual assault prosecution that was dismissed last year by Air Force Lieutenant General Craig Franklin. After General Franklin dismissed the charges, authority over the case was transferred to Air Force District of Washington in Maryland, new charges were preferred, a second Article 32 pretrial investigation was conducted, and the charges were referred to trial. Litigation of defense claims of unlawful command influence followed, and the trial judge eventually abated the proceedings after the Government asserted an attorney-client privilege over documents sought by the defense in connection with those claims. The Government appealed that abatement and the AFCCA reversed, finding that the military judge’s findings were incomplete.
I discussed the AFCCA’s decision in this post. I summarized our past coverage in this post.
Now Stars and Stripes report here that the case will proceed to trial despite a finding of improper influence by senior Air Force officials:
Lt. Col. Joshua Kastenberg, in a July 30 ruling in response to a defense motion to dismiss the case against Airman 1st Class Brandon T. Wright, found that Lt. Gen. Richard Harding, formerly the Air Force Judge Advocate General, had improperly influenced the case or had given the appearance of doing so.
Sexual assault in the military
One such instance, the judge ruled, was recommending that Wright’s case be transferred to another court-martial convening authority for a do-over after the first convening authority, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, dismissed the case in the summer of 2013. Franklin’s dismissal came after an Article 32 investigative hearing at Aviano Air Base, Italy.
Such transfers are almost unheard of. It happened in the Wright case, Kastenberg’s ruling says, in part because Harding was worried that “the failure to have charges preferred against SrA Wright would enable Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to gain needed votes on a pending bill to remove commanders from the court-martial process.”
Yet none of these actions affected the current case against Wright, Kastenberg said, because all parties involved in the second investigation — at the Air Force District of Washington — acted independently, with no unlawful command influence. As a result of that investigation, a convening authority sent the case to court-martial.