Please note:  Sen. Chuck Grassley is pushing for the Senate to approve the Military Justice Improvement Act, which would improve the system for handling sexual assault.  Sen. Grassley and his fellow supporters hope the bill will be considered as an amendment to the pending defense authorization bill.  In a speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Grassley said, “How many more lives need to be ruined before we are ready to take bold action?  If sexual assault isn’t prosecuted, predators will remain in the military and that results in a perception that sexual assault is tolerated in the military culture.  That destroys morale and it destroys lives.  The men and women who have volunteered to place their lives on the line deserve better.”  The full speech follows here.

Floor Statement of Sen. Chuck Grassley on the Military Justice Improvement Act
Delivered Thursday, June 9, 2016

I am proud to stand once again with Senator Gillibrand in support of the Military Justice Improvement Act.  

Two years ago, Congress enacted a number of common sense reforms as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.  

These changes were mostly good, common sense measures and I supported them.  

However, they were not sufficient.

As I said at the time, we are past the point of tinkering with the current system and hoping that does the trick.

I urged the Senate at that time to support bold action that would make sexual assault in the military a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, those of us arguing for the Military Justice Improvement Act did not prevail.

We were told to wait and see if the reforms that were included would work, while leaving in place the current military justice system.

Well, we’ve had time to see if things have changed.

The rate of sexual assault in the military is unchanged.
42% of service member survivors who reported retaliation were encouraged to drop the issue by their supervisor, or someone else in their chain of command.

A majority of service member survivors indicated that they were NOT satisfied with the official actions taken against the alleged perpetrator.

3 out of 4 survivors lack sufficient confidence in the military justice system to report the crime.

In fact, there has been a DECREASE in the percentage of survivors willing to make an unrestricted report of sexual assault.

Two years ago, when military leaders were arguing against the reforms that Senator Gillibrand and I and others were advocating, Congress was provided with data from military sexual assault cases that we now know was very misleading.
We were told that military commanders were taking cases that were “declined” by civilian prosecutors.
The implication was clear: The military system results in prosecutions that civilian prosecutors turn down.

An independent report by Protect our Defenders and reporting by the Associated Press shows that there was no evidence the military was taking cases that civilian prosecutors would not take.

When Senator Gillibrand and I wrote to the President asking for an independent investigation of how this misleading information was allowed to be presented to Congress, we received a response from Secretary Carter saying it was all a misunderstanding.

The Secretary’s response went into a semantic discussion of the meaning of certain terms.

Apparently in the military justice system, when a civilian prosecutor agrees to defer to the jurisdiction of the military to prosecute a case, it is listed as a “declination”.

Such a situation is very different from a civilian prosecutor refusing to prosecute a case.

If the military asks the civilian prosecutor to defer to the military’s jurisdiction, or it is done by mutual agreement, it is not a case of a civilian prosecutor turning down a prosecution.

As I said, a review of the cases used to back up the DoD’s claims found no evidence that civilian prosecutors had refused prosecutions.

Nevertheless, that was the clear implication of the statistics supplied to Congress by the Pentagon.
The response to our letter to President Obama claimed the authors of that review just didn’t understand the meaning of the term “declined” as it is used in the military justice system.

The reality is that the information the Pentagon provided to Congress was presented in a very misleading way.

When military leaders claimed that civilian prosecutors had declined to prosecute cases that the military then prosecuted, would it have had the same impact if they added a footnote saying that in this context, declined doesn’t really mean declined?

So to summarize, the reforms we were told would reduce military sexual assault haven’t worked.

And a chief rationale for opposing our reform of the military justice system was based on very misleading data.

How many more lives need to be ruined before we are ready to take bold action?

If sexual assault isn’t prosecuted, predators will remain in the military and that results in a perception that sexual assault is tolerated in the military culture.  

That destroys morale and it destroys lives.  

The men and women who have volunteered to place their lives on the line deserve better.  

Taking prosecutions out of the hands of commanders and giving them to professional prosecutors who are independent of the chain of command will help ensure impartial justice for the men and women of our armed forces.

Let’s not wait any longer.  Let’s get this done now.

 

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