2 soldiers get vastly different sentences for deadly crimes
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/9/2-soldiers-get-vastly-different-sentences-for-dead/By ADAM ASHTON - Associated Press - Saturday, April 9, 2016
TACOMA, Wash. (AP) - Two soldiers from the same Joint Base Lewis-McChord infantry battalion experienced two very different kinds of justice when they came home from training events a year apart and carried out deadly crimes.
Pvt. Jeremiah Hill, prosecuted in Army court, received a sentence of 45 years in prison for knifing another soldier in the heart on a Lakewood street, the News Tribune reported (
http://bit.ly/1MfaWFm).
The rookie soldier from a poor Chicago family had an Army-provided defense attorney and rarely showed remorse when he testified.
Spc. Skylar Nemetz, prosecuted in Pierce County Superior Court, received a sentence of less than 14 years for causing the death of his wife, Danielle, when he accidentally shot her in the head with rifle.
His Northern California family reached deep into their savings to hire an experienced private attorney. Nemetz wept on the witness stand and persuaded a jury he didn’t mean to kill his wife.
The disparities in outcomes for two soldiers from the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment show the differences in what can happen when the Army and Pierce County carry out their informal agreement to decide which agency should prosecute soldiers who commit crimes outside of JBLM.
Hill could have been prosecuted in a civilian court, where he likely would not have not received much more than 20 years for killing Geike, said the county prosecutor who handled the case for the year before it moved to military court.
That same offense, put in front of a military jury, got him more than double that time behind bars.
Believing the soldiers on the jury would agree that Geike’s death was an accident, Hill couldn’t contain his anger over his punishment. After Geike’s family left the courtroom, he shouted an expletive that revealed his frustration.
Had the Army taken Nemetz’s case, the infantryman with almost three years of military experience would have had to explain to other trained soldiers how he mishandled the rifle and killed his wife.
“You were an expert,” Superior Court Judge Jack Nevin, himself a retired Army judge, said before he sentenced Nemetz. “And the level of the expertise that you had shows the degree of recklessness. This isn’t someone who picked up a weapon for the first time.”
Open doors between prosecutors
JBLM and the Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office began opening the doors to trading criminal cases about two years ago, said deputy prosecutor John Sheeran.
It’s a common procedure in military communities around the country where criminal suspects could be prosecuted in different courts.
For whatever reason, Sheeran said, the county and the base were fairly unfamiliar with each other when the Army and Air Force reached out to the prosecutor’s office in 2014.
