Circumstantial Evidence in a Southern Court Martial in 1962 at Fort Benning, Georgia

Friends and Kin:

Since I have been looking back at my experiences things keep popping up that I want to share. Some are funny, some poignant, some sad, some just plain horrible, but on balance life has been pretty damn good. I could tell about Sammy Bates keeping an egg in the inkpot hole on his desk for almost a year in Miss Ruby Bogan’s Civics Classroom, and the day when someone bumped the desk and it rolled onto the floor and broke, and how fast the room emptied.  Now that was a classroom evacuation that was instant. Or the time that Billy Ray hid the coon under a wastebasket in Mr. Snead’s math class. Or my experience with dogs when I walked door to door when I ran for City Council in 1971, or when I sold Bibles, Prayer Books and Missals door to door in New Orleans in 1954, not knowing anything whatsoever about them and not being a Catholic, or how my roommate in college, Robert Chabreck, won the Louisiana tobacco spitting contest. He was a Forestry major, and said the field of play was down hill and splatters counted.

I think I’ll tell about a military Court Martial I sat through, rather than tried, when I was a JAG officer at

Fort

 

Benning

in 1960-63. I think it was during the Berlin Crisis, when Army reserve units were called up from all over the country.

Fort

 

Benning

was the

United States

 

Infantry

 

Army

 

Center

, where crack units were trained. They received Ranger training, jungle warfare, and even had a jump school there. it was the home of the Infantry, the foot soldier, and the Infantry regulars thought they were Gods who had won every war since the beginning of time, and the world depended on them. You have never seen cold, undisputed, hostile certainty in a man’s eyes until you see a line Master Sergeant who believes in his mission. It is an arrogance and chin jutting righteousness that makes you want to laugh, but they are serious as a heart attack, and I am damn glad they are.

Anyway, at the call up, these little units had members who, to avoid draft, many times joined a reserve unit for six months and managed to stay out of the heat, and they were as unsoldierly as any bunch of kids playing army. This bunch from

New Jersey

hit the post and were assigned barracks (billets) that housed a bunch of soldiers under one roof.  Some of these men were professionals, Doctors, for example, as were Krantz and Sosnik, two of the most rumpled, rusty, strange looking individuals I had ever seen.  Evidently, from the evidence produced against them, someone found them in the upper bunk together, with some funny smelling herbs rolled in cigarette papers. The first time I saw them was in the stockade, as their appointed military counsel, to defend them from charges of sodomy and possession.

I told them that they had the choice of selecting a local lawyer from

Columbus

, which was the city nearby, or having me, an inexperienced, very young looking lst Lt. weighing in at around 135, a callow youth of twenty-five and looking sixteen (I couldn’t buy a beer without being carded till I was forty) and I am sure they immediately felt they needed any civilian counsel. And they had money, being doctors. I gave them a list of six or seven names and their phone numbers.

They chose a tall, portly old lawyer of about sixty, old to me then, I had never heard of.  Every time I saw him, he was in his white linen suit that looked like he slept in, a pair of scuffed white shoes, string tie and a ratty white straw hat that he wore on top of a coiffure of wonderful wavy white hair. He spoke slowly, with the

Georgia

accent you hear in the movies. There really is a southern accent like that, spoken in

Georgia

primarily, but nowhere else in the south do they do their words like that unless it is

South Carolina

.

Louisiana

, for example, curls its concerted lips in contempt at some Yankee playing the role of a Louisianian pretending to have a southern accident, using the

Georgia

thing as the only accent we are permitted to have down south.

I had no role in the trial, as he did all of the work, if you call it work, for he just listened to what our clients had to say, nodded, went tsk tsk tsk a lot, and shook his head at the injustice being inflicted on our young soldier boys. Seems as if Sosnik had been brought into the service without a physical and he had no thingy, having been deprived of it in some incident somewhere down the line, which probably would have disqualified him from the service right off, but seems as if New Jersey didn’t do physicals before shipping them off. It was a scary time. We thought the world was on the brink of nuclear war. The old lawyer did no preparation, and relied exclusively upon his elocution and oratorical skills, and opening and closing arguments. I watched in wonder.

The case was entirely circumstantial in nature, says our leaned counsel.  “Suh-kum-stanshal, puahly and simply, suh-kum-stanshal.” Standing before the panel of scowling officers, consisting of a Bird Colonel in the middle, flanked by Lt. Colonels on his right and left, flanked in turn by majors and them by captains, he thundered forth his surprise at the huge mistake our grand and glorious United States Army could make in charging these two helpless boys with such heinous crimes. He then proceeded to distinguish the difference between circumstantial evidence and direct evidence, to show how the prosecutor and accusers of these poor boys had erred.

“Now, gentlemen of th’ jurah, it is high time that a basic in our law is made puhfeckly cleah. Inasmuch as ouah two boys heah are accused of these appalling chahges, it is incumbent upon youh honahs to know th’ diffahrence between suh-kum-stanshal evidence and Deyereck evidence. Keepin’ in mind that theah is nuhthin’ heah in this case but weak weak weak suh-kum-stanshal evidence that you have to considah, you should know just what that is. Nobody saw these boys doin’ anythin’ irregulah. The so called herb within the cigarette paper they had with them has nevah been tested for its contents theahfoah there is no direct evidence it is a prohibited substance.

Now ah’m gonna tell you the propah diffahrence between the two legal concepts. Now, when you see tracks leadin’ up to a gophah hole, that is suh-kum-stanshal evidence that the gophah is in the hole. Howevah, when you see the gophah stick his head out from the hole, that, yoah honah’s, is DIRECT evidence the gophah is in the hole. Heah, theah is no evidence of any gophah bein’ in any hole except suppahsition by the prosahcutahs that they ah tryin’ to make you believe! If he has a gophah in any hole, he should bring forth his gophah. If not, rest assuahed, he has not met his buhden of proof that the gophah is indeed in that hole, which is nessuhsary to convict.”

Believe it or not, they found these turkeys innocent.

I would not have believed it. 

So that’s the rant of today.