Author Topic: End the Navy’s vessel exception. Give sailors and Marines the due process afforded to every other US  (Read 226 times)

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rangerrebew

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End the Navy’s vessel exception. Give sailors and Marines the due process afforded to every other US service member
David Johnson
 

The Navy vessel exception to Article 15 non-judicial punishment (NJP) is outdated and needs to be removed. Whether you are familiar with NJP by the terms “captain’s mast,” “office hours," “Article 15,” “NJP’d” or “ninja punched,” fundamental fairness demands the end to the vessel exception.

When Article 15 was first enacted by Congress in 1950, there was no right to turn down NJP and demand trial by court-martial. When Article 15 was amended in 1962, service members were granted the right to turn down NJP unless “attached to or embarked in a vessel;” this is what is known as the Navy’s “vessel exception.” The vessel exception was only intended to apply to military members aboard ship. This is clear by the advice from the assistant attorney general at the time, Norbert A. Schlei, to President Kennedy when he wrote the possibility that the vessel exception might be applied to persons “considerably removed from the vessel involved, and without regard to whether actual boarding of the vessel is planned for the immediate future … would appear to be inconsistent with the congressional intent.” In 1997, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) ruled that the vessel exception should be, “limited to situations such as where the service members were aboard a vessel, in the immediate vicinity and in the process of boarding, or attached to vessels and absent without authority in foreign ports.

https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2020/10/22/end-the-navys-vessel-exception-give-sailors-and-marines-the-due-process-afforded-to-every-other-us-service-member/