Eugene Roy Fidell (born March 31, 1945) is an American lawyer specializing in military law.[1] He is currently the Florence Rogatz Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School.[2][3] (wikipedia)
Basically, you're not supposed to lay your hands on a recruit. You don't really want to have drill instructors grabbing a recruit by the collar, which is what happened here, and you don't want to have them hitting them with elbows.
How do you get there from here? They haven't persuaded me that this is valid, ... You have to have a disruption of civil authority before the military can perform activities such as surveillance.
I think people around the world are going to be scratching their heads at that sentence. The conduct of which this soldier was convicted is highly offensive, and if this is all one gets it's not impunity, but it's getting real close.
It does look like there were some major gaps in the earlier investigations, which were not criminal investigations incidentally.
The real question is who is the independent prosecutor who is liberated to pursue these cases. There is no central prosecution office run by commanders. So you don't have a D.A. thinking, I'm going to follow this wherever it leads.
It's to have an exhaustive look at the matter, not only from the standpoint of potentially assigning responsibility but finding out what happened and making recommendations of a systemic nature so that it doesn't happen again.
It is a fact that having a request for a witness can be a form of leverage; it gives you something that you can negotiate with the other side about. If you don't ask, you're never going to have any leverage.
You don't have a D.A. thinking, I'm going to follow this wherever it leads.