Don't know anything really about military justice but is a reduction in rank & 4 months in jail the normal punishment for taking a photo with a dead enemy's body? The burden to prove he was guilty of all the other charges was not met by the prosecution. The system, as the saying goes is set up to let 100 guilty men go free rather than 1 innocent man be found guilty. Everyday throughout the US, guilty men walk out of the court building because the burden of proof was not met. It's not a perfect system by any means but it's the one we have.
I didn't follow every twist & turn of this case but I did get the feeling early on that the prosecution didn't have enough for a murder conviction. That charge is traditionally the hardest for a jury to find someone guilty of & without a signed confession, DNA, (or even a body), video... it was going to be a tough row to hoe. When the prosecution was discovered to have attempted to put tracking software onto the defense's computer, that was a major mistake esp. when they appeared to mislead the judge who approved it...Sloppy work, way over the line & shows to an outsider like me that this prosecutor's office wasn't the A team. When you break a law to enforce the law, that almost always works out to your detriment, not the accused's. The installation of bugging/email tracking software is the job of law enforcement (NCIS here) who do it a lot more & evidently are a lot better at it than the prosecutor's office...who is, of course allowed to do so but their job is to prosecute & they had enough of that on their plate. Lastly, when the prosecution failed to ask their star witness who they gave immunity to the 2 questions needed to ensure that he wasn't involved in the commission of the death of a wounded combatant, I wasn't surprised. Sloppy work by the prosecution again are the words that come to my mind.
Was I the only one who saw parallels to the OJ case here? With OJ, LE missteps (I'm being kind here, LAPD flat out was caught with planting evidence. Remember the blood splatter patterns?) Prosecutorial errors, a star on trial already found guilty in the court of media/public opinion but acquitted by a jury of his peers. Anyone in LE or social work who interacts with domestic violence victims knew OJ was guilty but it was up to the LA County DA's office to prove it...which they did not.
Chief Gallagher is either guilty & the system worked as the bar to conviction was not met or he is innocent & the system worked as it should as per the Constitution & the UCMJ. I hope an internal investigation is underway so that this mess does not happen again.
