Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3311 - 3315 (Sept 19th - 24th)
Method of Madness:
Global Moderator Comment While this is definitely interesting, and I'm certainly not discouraging this topic, I feel like I should give the obvious disclaimer that nobody should take anything here as legal advice.
Is it cold in here?:
True and important!
That said, if you're ever in Faye's situation, remember that legal advisors tell people that only the prosecutor can grant immunity. That's exactly the sort of thing someone like Faye wouldn't know.
Imagine how this would go if Faye didn't have her core of ethics and loyalty. She'd start turning people in to save her [neck]. She'd have an incentive to testify against as many people as possible. She'd have an incentive to throw innocent people into the gears, because the guilty people may have organized crime connections that make it too dangerous to inform on them.
I'm not speculating, this is how it plays out in real life according to my reading.
So it's not legal advice, it's practical advice, to drop any friends in (for example) the drug scene. Being innocent is some protection and occasionally useful but NOT enough!
Spoe:
--- Quote from: Emperor Norton on 21 Sep 2016, 07:00 ---... the IRS is not allowed to, of its own volition, share your Tax records with law enforcement.
--- End quote ---
The flip side is, just like Al Capone, sometimes what brings a criminal down is not having paid taxes on their illegal income, not their original crimes.
sitnspin:
Since the introduction of RICO, I don't think tax evasion is nearly as common an approach as it used to be. All you really have to do now is snag some lower level operator and use them to drag down the organisation.
Morituri:
If Bubbles has not been discharged, and has been absent for more than 180 days, then unless she goes back to the Army on her own initiative or can prove she at least intended to (which seems unlikely), she'll be prosecuted for Desertion.
Either way her unit's Commanding Officer has very wide latitude in how to handle the situation. But Desertion is extremely serious, and AWOL is much less so.
If she gets charged with AWOL rather than Desertion, then in the best case, if the CO thinks there are extenuating circumstances (including psychological trauma) or decides given her circumstances that she's been 'punished enough', she could just be handed an Administrative Summary Discharge and walk away. More likely given the amount of time she's been gone, she could get an OTHC (Other Than Honorable Conditions) Discharge, which is similar but revokes any decorations etc and strips her of all rank for purposes of benefits, retirement, etc. There's an outside chance that she could get a DD (Dishonorable) discharge, which has all the bad parts of an OTHC and, as an added benefit, would strip her of 'veteran' status for all VA and retirement benefits and show up on her criminal record. In the absolute worst case, if the CO is vindictive or just plain vicious, she could be tried by Court Martial, get the DD, AND spend up to a year in the stockade. But in the modern US military that hardly ever happens. Usually long-term AWOL accept an OTHC discharge as an alternative to court-martial. Less than one percent of AWOL go to court martial in the last few years, and even if they do go to court martial they aren't very likely to get a DD and/or stockade time. DD is usually reserved for people who did actively bad things in conjunction with their AWOL, like destroying military property, trying to convince others to leave the at the same time, leaving the army to avoid punishment for something else, etc.
EDIT: On reflection, working at an illegal fighting arena is technically a criminal offense that might motivate her commanding officer to press for a DD.
On the other hand if she gets charged with Desertion it's much much worse. The CO has a lot of discretion about what kind of Court Martial to convene, and can limit penalties to as little as 30 days stockade time and/or OTHC by convening one with less authority - but it usually does go straight to a Court Martial and a DD is usually part of the penalties. Although Deserters are only rarely sentenced to more than 6 months, there is essentially no limit to the penalty in a Desertion case. Depending on the circumstances and what else she did, she could be looking at up to life imprisonment.
Anyway, if Bubbles is not properly discharged, then absolutely the best thing she could do for purposes of getting on with her life would be to engage an attorney (yes there are civilian attorneys who specialize in military justice), then use the attorney to contact her unit and handle the defense and/or discharge negotiation. That would guarantee that she'd be charged with AWOL rather than Desertion, because it would show an intent to return.
Of course if CW is not paying her, then she probably can't scratch together enough money to get an attorney to sneeze on her case, let alone argue it to her CO and/or a Court Martial.
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