Transcripts For CSPAN2 Sexual Assault In The Military Forum

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Sexual Assault In The Military Forum 20240714

It was created in 2015 in accordance with the act in 2015 as amended. Our mandate is to advise the secretary of defense on investigation, prosecution of allegations of Sexual Assault and other Sexual Misconduct involving members of the armed forces. Please note that todays meeting is being transcribed. A complete written transcribe will be posted on the website. Todays meeting will begin with the dac ipads fiscal 2018 for acquittal rates of Sexual Assault in the military based on case documents from all military Sexual Assault cases closed during the fiscal year. Next, staff director will provide an overview of the Draft Department of defense report on allegations of misconstruct. This draft report was submitted to the dac ipad in fulfillment of the Defense Authorization act for fiscal year 2019. Following the overview of the report, Service Representatives involved in the report, drafting and Data Collection will appear before the committee to answer questions about the data, and the report methodology. Following the collateral misconduct, the committee will hear from three additional panels. Services military Justice Division chief. The Services Special Victims Counsel Program Managers and the Services Trial Defense Service organization chief. These panelists will each respond to questions from Committee Members regarding their organizations written responses to questions, the dac ipad committed in may on Sexual Assault and acquittal rates. The case adjudication process and the victim declinenation to submit to the process. And i want to thank these were very very substantive responses. And the committee will receive a case working review group and regarding the fiscal year 2018 case adjudication data report plan. For the final session of the meeting the committee will deliberate on the dod collateral misconduct report and Services Responses to its written questions. Each Public Meeting of the da krchcdac ipad, weve requested no comments for the meeting. If a member of the audience would like to comment on the issue record please direct it to the dac ipad all at the discretion of the chair. Written comments may be submitted at anytime for consideration. Before we do the data review i want to thank everybody to be here today. I think well start off with colonel ware. Thank you. As the chair said this was public law 115232. In that legislation set out the secretary of defense acting through the dac ipad, including the following information. Im reading now from the legislation. There are three requirements that this legislation put out. Number one, the number of instances in which a covered individual was accused of misconduct or crimes considered collateral to the investigation of a Sexual Assault committed against the individual. And so, its important to understand what a covered individual is. Its defined in this section means an individual who is identified as a victim of Sexual Assault in the case file of criminal organization. The number two, number of instances in which an adverse action was taken against the covered individual who was accused of collateral misconduct or crimes described in paragraph one and number three, the third piece of information required was the percentage of investigations of Sexual Assaults that involved an accusation or adverse action against a covered individual, as prescribed in paragraphs one and two. The services were tasked with gathering the requested information and that information and the draft report was forwarded to the dac ipad. Mr. Nye gave the report to offer any information or an analysis and provide that to the department of defense and mr. Nye requested that dac reply and to congress by september 30th. They reviewed the report for the Services Including the coast guard. The staff requested a meeting with individuals responsible for the information in the report. And this was held on july 9th. The staff requested the meeting so we could better understand the methodology behind gathering information because it was clear that there were difference in methodology and definitions between the services. For example, the Army Definition of accused is different from the navy and marine corps definition. The navy and marine corps only counted collateral misconduct committed by the victim if an inquiry into the misconduct was actually initiated. We were told that that meant a report of investigation was initiated. The army defined the accused as a victim who may have committed a u krchuc the air force did not require a separate investigation into the misconduct. The army had a very low number for the time period april 1, 2017 to march 31st, 2019 involving an army victim. Based upon the experience with the case reviews and the Court Martial data base we knew at that something was off. During the meeting we discovered that the army only counted penetrated Sexual Assault investigations where the others counted penetrated and contact. The army, marine and air force sent us corrected numbers which changed the report. As the staff reviewed the percentages, became apartment the percentages did not accurately reflect the victims punished as those victims who committed collateral misconduct. The number of victims receiving adverse action out of the total number of assault investigations involving Service Member victims from their respective services. And so as a result of the report and the different methodologies, we thought it was important that dac Ipad Committee have an opportunity to review the report which we sent for your review and also had an opportunity to deliberate and discuss which is going to occur during the end of this public session, in order to compile a letter back to the secretary of defense. And pending any of your questions, thats all i have right now. Anybody have any questions for colonel ware . Then well turn to mr. Mason for your remarks. Good morning, maam. Committee. You dont have to strap in this morning because im not as excited as i was yesterday so were only going to cover just the conviction and acquittal rates. Its a couple of slides. This afternoon i cannot promise we will not be excited again because were going to do all the data. But for conviction and acquittal rates, the first chart that we have up is the outcomes for penetrated offenses referred to Court Martial and i apologize its just the one side only on the lefthand side of the room. If you look the at top of the slide, fy 2018 when someone had a referred penetrative offense, the other extreme is 37 about. 3 of the time they were acquitted of all charges. So if they had multiple charges with the most serious the penetrative offense in 43 of the time acquitted. And the 2017 acquittal rate for penetrative if he ever had was almost 31 . When you look at those, that same class of cases whereas a penetrative referred to trial and then handled, adjudicated by a military judge, the conviction rate for the penetrative offense goes to 33. 3 , which was previously 28. 2 for overall. And the acquittal rate drops to 17 . So you have a much lower acquittal rate when youre going for a military judge and its a penetrative offense. Where it gets interesting is when you now look at when its adjudicated by a panel of members, the conviction rate is 23. 2 , which is slightly lower than the overall rate, but the acquittal rate is 59. 4 . So looking at this statistic it might be safe to say if you have a penetrative case thats referred you may want that adjudicated in front of members because your chances of acquittal are much higher than if you go before a military judge. We have the numbers for 18, 17, 16, 15, the acquittal rate bounces back and forth there isnt a true trend that we can identify thats going in one direction or the other only to say in the most recent year the acquittal rate with members is much higher than in the previous year. And now we want to look at those same metrics when were talking about a contact offense that was referred to trial. And you have a much smaller universe of cases, but when youre looking at convicted of a contact offense as the most serious offense, its almost 14 and a half percent. And going back when we were talking penetrative, 28. 2 of convicted much penetrative aacquittal. 37. 3. A higher acquittal overall of penetrative than realizing with the contact offenses. If you have a contact case that is adjudicated in front of a judge, you are at 14, almost 15 for conviction for the contact and only 6 1 2 for acquittal, but you have a much larger, 78. 7 , theyre convicted of some other offense. So the contact Sexual Assault was the most serious offense they were charged with, one or more multiples and other offenses maybe an article 92 or article 112 something along those lines. They were found guilty of those rather than more likely to be found guilty of those offenses than the sex assault or be completely acquitted. And then when you look at it for military members, the overall acquittal rate, again, is much higher when youre dealing with members. So, the military judge was realizing 6. 4 overall acquittal rate for the contact. In front of members, it was 46. 7 acquittal. Interestingly though, the convicted for a contact offense with members was almost 17 and it was 15 with a judge. So the members are finding them guilty of a contact offense more than the judge is, but the judge is finding them guilty of something and the members are more likely to acquit. So we wanted to just give you an overview of whats happening with penetrative and contact so that you have that in the back of your mind as youre hearing the professionals today and you can ask their opinion of do they see this as a trend . Do they see this as a problem . Is this how the system should work . We are not drawing any conclusions that are right or wrong, were just giving you what we know from our statistics in the system whats happening at the trial level. Thank you, maam. Thank you, mr. Mason. I have a couple of questions. On the contact offenses where the military judge was convicting a substantial number of nonsex offenses, would those charges standing alone have had to go to a general Court Martial . Without knowing the specific other offenses, i cant tell you. Okay. In our data base, we in order for a case to be in our data base it has to be a penetrative or contact Sexual Assault, but we also enter every other offense on the chart sheet so we could go through our data base and look and say contact was the most serious Sexual Assault, but was there an attempted murder or Something Else that was a rather extreme offense, a serious offense that would rise to the level of a general Court Martial. We could tell you that, i just dont have it off the top of my head. Things such as underage drinking or fraternization, would those go to Court Martial . Not necessarily. If you go back, take the acquittal rate of 2018 and convicted of nonsexual offense, i cant see the numbers that well, whats the total percentage then . Your total if you do convicted of Sexual Assault any penetrative or contact Sexual Assault youre going to be at 28 , 29 , and then your acquittal acquittal or convicted. Acquittal is about 70 . So acquittal of any Sexual Assault, if youre convicted of Something Else is about a 70 rate . Yes, maam. Thank you. Are there i in other questions for mr. Mason. I have a question. Mr. Mason, thank you. Im just curious sorry about that if there is any similar data in the civilian context for a judge or jury outcomes on cases that you know of . I am not aware of it. We have talked and when kate is up speaking later she could probably tell you other studies shes looked at with respect to the investigations in Going Forward. Right. We could probably look at the Sentencing Commission and see what metrics theyre tracking to see if something would address it, but i dont know of anything that is a direct correlation to what we have. And just to be clear, these this data tells you whats happening, but it doesnt tell you why anything is happening. It does not. So that would involve further analysis . And we can tell you, these are the results and if you want to see the record of trial for these cases, we have much of the documents. We dont have the complete transcript, but we can pull out what the article 32 hearing was or the sja advised. We can say that the we are going to step away from this conference briefly as the u. S. Senate is about to gavel in for what is expected to be a quick pro forma session. We will be back to the meeting on military Sexual Assault as soon as the senate is done. The presiding officer the senate will come to order. The clerk will read a communication to the senate. The clerk washington, d. C. , august 23, 2019. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable steve daines, a senator from the state of montana, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed chuck grassley, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order, the Senate Stands adjourned until 10 00 a. M. , on tuesday, august 27, 2019. Adjourn back now live to the meeting on Sexual Assault with the u. S. Military. Thank you. Mr. Mason, i want to make sure i understand, in order for the dacipad at doing the best work at grabbing the data, you need a better data base system, is that correct . We actually need a legitimate data base. We are using a share point website, which is a way to share documents. We, because we are a documentbased system and we have to have a legal document that we can look at and pull the information from, we take those and enter them into fields so that we can aggregate what we have, but then to get an outcome, the only way to do it is to do an excel spread sheet and separate by columns and count them. Its not a data base. If you have anybody that works in data base, this is not. Its a work run. It has served remarkably well for its purposes. The jpp started this with limited funds, limited people. I mentioned it to you yesterday because of one person, we have one individual, stacy, who has entered all 4,000 cases into our data base. So shes read every one of toes documents and then categorizes it and enters it, but the only way we can do this Going Forward is with a legitimate data base that youre able to track an offense, each individual offense as a unit and then combine those units into the case, and then look at the cases out. We are unable to do that at this point. And that would better serve the members of this committee, is that correct . It would better serve the members of this committee and allow you to present the information to the services as customers, as well as to congress, who has asked you to investigate this. It would allow you to actually do the job that youve been asked to do. Thank you. Thank you so much for the information and i call you our inspector gadget with all of the data and we love it. You have to understand your information and be able to manage it. Are you aware in the different branches of the military, are you aware of any Information Management system or data base that is able to track the information and report data as you have presented to us today . There are systems within each service that attempt to track Court Martials beginning to end, however, and theres something ill get into with the data report, we ask them to provide the cases to us so that we can add them to our data base. We do not have the when a chart sheet is created we dont have access to them, we have to wait for them to provide it to us. The problem we have a run into, the number of cases the Services Report to us as being is valid case for the purposes of our study, the actual responsive rate is nowhere near what they think it should be. So, as an example, the services, they gave us 774 cases in this past year, that they believe are a penetrative or contact Sexual Assault that was resolved in that fiscal year. Only 574 of those were actual cases that we could track. So 70 75 of what they told us were actually the cases. The other ones that were reported were maybe a child sex assault that we dont track or maybe a different fiscal year that happened to surface in their system or they duplicated and told us the same name two or three times. Unfortunately this year we ran into an issue where we have a multiple of cases that they were reported as being cases, but they have no documentation to back it up in their system. So we have a name, but we dont have a actual case so we dont know that its actually a case and we cant count it. So, the short answer is, no, there is not a system that im aware of that can do what we are trying to do. Yes, sir. Thank you, mr. Mason. I think were ready for the panel of Service Panel on collateral misconduct and that would be lt. Colonel khasan, lieutena lt. Colonel mail and lieutenant mill miller. Ic good morning, welcome. Thank you for being here to share your perspectives on th

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