11/15/2017

ARMY/CRIME/MILITARY: “The U.S. Army has failed to submit military conviction records to federal databases in as many as one-fifth of all cases, the Army’s top officer said Wednesday, allowing those service members to bypass legal prohibitions against buying and possessing weapons…
The Army, from 1998 to 2016, logged more than 2,400 dishonorable discharges resulting from convictions in general court-martial proceedings, the most serious of three levels of military trials, according to reports submitted to Congress. Names of defendants in those cases should have been submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for inclusion in its national background check system, after Congress in 1996 voted to begin requiring all domestic violence convictions be reported.
That would mean, at a minimum, nearly 500 individuals have been overlooked in the system, based on Gen. Milley’s comments. That figure does not include other Army court-martial proceedings that might be encompassed by federal law, or the hundreds or thousands of cases in other military branches.”

-Nancy A. Youssef, “Army Didn’t Submit ‘Significant Amount’ of Military Convictions to Federal Databases,” The Wall Street Journal online, Nov. 15, 2017 05:57pm