Political Quotes

“while the chairman does agree that the serious crime of sexual assault should be taken out of the chain of command, our bill requests and requires that all serious crimes be taken out of the chain of command because of the existence of bias. And we have two data points that prove that bias. One is the poor results we have seen for survivors of sexual assaults over the last 10 years that data has been collected, and the second data point we have, which has been developed over the last 3 years, is the existence of racial bias. Protect Our Defenders did a serious report in 2017, and it determined that across all services, looking at all punishments, Black and Brown servicemembers were punished approximately two times more often than White servicemembers, looking at both nonjudicial and court-martials. And that show of bias means that the military justice system isn't working for many people. It is not working for plaintiffs, and it is not working for defendants. And, in fact, when our allies looked at this same issue, particularly defendants' rights over the last 40 years, they determined that bias in the system was incompatible with their views of justice, and they decided that for defendants' rights, specifically, all serious crimes should be decided by trained military prosecutors.…”