Why Joining the U.S. Military is Especially Dangerous for Women

By Isis Goldberg

For some high school students joining the U.S. military can seem like an attractive alternative to pursuing higher education.  Other students who think they can't afford a college education or believe their grades aren’t good enough, see the military as their only option.  For women, there exists an especially high and unexpected physical risk - the risk of being sexually assaulted by a fellow soldier. 

The “War Against Terror” has been the least popular war in the history of the United States.  As a result, instead of enforcing a draft, President George W. Bush inserted a clause to the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 which allowed military recruiters free access to all high school students' social security numbers, telephone numbers, and addresses.  Consequently, many inner-city students were, and continue to be visited, even hassled, by military recruiters and enticed with rewards such as:  money, cars, and even citizenship for undocumented students and their families. 

For women who decide to join the military, they face a staggering risk of rape or sexual assault. According to a report, thirty percent of women enrolled in the U.S. military are victims of rape while seventy-one percent of women become victims of a sexual assault and ninety percent are sexually harassed.  These statistics were gathered from women who visited a veteran's hospital, although other studies pose the percentage of victims from recent wars even higher.

Unfortunately, even these numbers may not be the correct figures as many rape incidents go unreported.  The U.S. military is most literally a boys club (with a female population of 14 %) and many female recruits are encouraged to keep silent to promote group morale.  Not surprisingly, many women probably choose not report their attacks because only 8 % of military sexual assault cases are referred to courts martial.  Alternatively, they run the risk of facing negative treatment and being hushed for exposing the charges.

The few cases which ultimately end up before a military tribunal, and result in convictions, usually end up handed down minimal sentences to perpetrators.

The high incidence of rape in the military has been a hot topic for some time, some measures taken to combat it. Yet, there is still a grave risk associated with being a female in the U.S. military.  If you know a female who is considering joining the military, please let them know of this additional risk which is associated with doing so.  One must make an informed decision when deciding whether you want to trust your life to the very people from whom you will likely need protection.

Thirty Years after Lifting the Moratorium on Capital Punishment, Changes of Heart in the Legal Institution

By Zannie Carlson

The New York Times just ran a piece about Supreme Court Justice Stevens’ reassessment of his stance on the death penalty, more than thirty years after he promoted and helped reintroduce the policy. Stevens writes about his observations and revelations in a review for a new book on capital punishment called Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Early in his career as a Supreme Court Justice, Stevens advocated for the death penalty by voting to lift a moratorium on the practice with the expectation that the punishment could be used wisely, and with utmost care in deliberation. More than thirty years later, Stevens explains his major concerns with the death penalty today stem from trigger-happy judges, political alliances on the bench, and the court’s refusal to recognize and rectify race-based sentencing. Death penalty sentencing became not about the accused, nor even the injured, but the judges themselves. All of the concerns that Stevens cited as limitations of his support of the policy became the standard, as rationality gave way to personalities and prejudices.

The New York Times adds that Stevens first expressed his opinion that the death penalty was unconstitutional in a concurrence in 2008, which leads us to wonder, how long has Stevens doubted his initial judgment on the death penalty? Has political pressure on the bench influenced Stevens to be compliant on the issue? If so, what made him come forward now? We already know that Stephens’ 1976 endorsement and partial orchestration of capital punishment policy leaves him partially accountable for the execution of more than 1,00 people during his term, but without the robe and gavel, how influential will Stevens be in these last years of his life? Combination skeptic-idealist that I am, I still believe his influence will enhance his activism and serve as an important vehicle in moving discourse on the issue forward. Stevens’ review will be published in The New York Review of Books, on Dec. 23.

After reaching a peak 98 executions in 1999 since the moratorium was lifted, the death penalty in general has been in decline; executions this year will amount to about half that number. Like Justice Stevens, the American Law Institute, the highly influential organization of lawyers, judges, and academics responsible for compiling and formulating general rules of law, including use of capital punishment in its 1962 Model Penal Code, withdrew its support of the death penalty system in 2009. The group similarly felt that its efforts to “make the death penalty less arbitrary” were often undermined by conflicting instructions in the courtroom. The A.L.I. ultimately found that the risks of executing innocent individuals, the likelihood of race leading court decisions, and correlation between inadequate or incompetent representation and poverty precluded the possibility of fair implementation of capital punishment.

Interestingly, the public does not share Stevens’ and the A.L.I.’s opinions on the death penalty, as a 2010 survey shows 64% of polled Americans in favor of the execution of individuals convicted of murder. While the public may be hard on crime, U.S. execution statistics indicate a cyclical pattern. With the A.L.I against the death penalty, courts lose a strong ally, and although it is too soon to say, courts may express a greater reluctance to sentence individuals to death. Despite popular opinion, the downward trend of executions in America may continue to fall in the coming years.

Other Significant Problems with TSA's New Policies

Hello Readers,

Richael Faithful, TMA's Editor-In-Chief here. Just before tomorrow's holiday, I wanted to offer two important angles to the recent TSA security inspection controversy.

For transgender or gender non-conforming people, TSA's new inspection procedures may prove especially invasive and troublesome. The National Center for Transgender Equality issued a really helpful resource this week, "Transgender Travelers and New TSA Policies," which tells trans and gender non-conforming people their legal rights against inspection abuse. In my mind, the value of this resource is that it helps people navigate situations in which ignorant or unprofessional officials may subject certain individuals to additional scrutiny (e.g. if one's appearance does not "match" one's ID gender marker) that may led to serious problems.

Another troublesome implication of the new TSA policies is that some politicians are exploiting this opportunity to promote racial profiling. Although most notably, Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) wrote to President Obama that he supports behavioral profiling over the new policies, he has commented to the press that he supports "profiling not solely based on race." The latter is racial profiling while the former is an effective law enforcement tool. Anti-racial profiling advocates make this key distinction all of the time--one is illegal and the other is not, for good reason. Check-out the Rights Working Group's new report on racial profiling, "Faces of Racial Profiling: A Report from Communities Across America."

If you are traveling for the holiday, be safe and informed.

Fighting For and With Our LGBTQ Young People

For a legal angle on the crisis of homophobia/trans-phobia and how its killing our young people, check out the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights blog entry, "Fighting For and With our LGBTQ Young People." 

No Student Left Behind: Ensuring The Accessibility of Reading Technologies at Universities

By; Gary C. Norman, Esq. L.L.M. Candidate 2011 & Commissioner, Maryland Commission on Human Relations

Viewing the show Star Trek Next Generation as a teenager during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I did not contemplate that, not that distant in the future, Americans would possess Star Trek like reading and communication methods and devices, such as the e-book and the IPhone.  The peril of technological change is, however, not all in civic society may always benefit.  For instance, blind or vision impaired individuals for whom the benefit of biomedical eye implants like Geordie is not yet available may be excluded constructively or intentionally from the promise of emerging technologies if legal safeguards are lacking.  This entry will thusly explore the perspective of blind or vision impaired persons, or other persons who have disabilities that cause reading standard print not to be an option, in relation to the introduction of e-books by some post-secondary educational institutions.

In 2009, universities in Arizona and several other states engaged in a partnership with the vendor of the Kindle– Amazon, Inc. - to introduce, on a voluntary basis, this emerging mode of reading into post-secondary education.  Trumpeted as an innovative pilot program by Amazon Inc., e-book readers would be furnished to students replacing paper based books in select classes.  In addition, the 2010 testimony of Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Division of Civil Rights before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, indicates that, because of the cost of paper based books and the positive features of e-books, such as their light weight, e-books may replace paper based books in three to five years.

Initially providing an e-book reader that possessed text to speech capabilities, Amazon, Inc. succumbed to the pressure of the Authors' Guild.

Whereas emerging technologies might not cause an issue for able-bodied students matriculated at universities, blind, vision impaired, or otherwise disabled students and policy advocates alike possess grave concerns that emerging technologies, to the extent they are not accessible, will impede an equal education of students with disabilities.  Amazon, Inc. triggered off text to speech capabilities in its e-book reader such that all of its menus could not be equally accessed by blind or vision impaired students.  The Authors' Guild, which represents authors, argued that reading books out loud violated copyrights.  In 2009, the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the blind, members of an advocacy coalition named the Reading Rights Coalition, filed litigation against Arizona State University – one of the partners with Amazon, Inc.  In addition, NFB and ACB filed complaints with the Departments of Education and Justice alleging unlawful discrimination by five other universities who had partnered in the pilot program.

Notwithstanding the arguable violation of the law (i.e. the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990), the issue is that, from a fairness and practical standpoint, students with sight or learning disabilities may either have to wait long periods of time to acquire books in alternative formats or may have to engage in proactive endeavors to acquire their books from publishers.  I can attest, as a student with a sight disability, that acquiring and utilizing books in alternative formats (e.g. on digital CD) or as a PDF that has yet to undergo further conversion to be accessible have been – sometimes challenging and often time consuming - experiences.  For an able-bodied student, however, just like the introduction of the Gutenberg bible, reading by way of a device, such as the Kindle DX, can be instantaneous.

Assistant Attorney General Perez of the Civil Rights Division has stated that, “Advancing technology is systematically changing the way universities approach education, but we must be sure that emerging technologies offer individuals with disabilities the same opportunities…”

On January 11, 2010, the plaintiffs entered into an unpublished settlement agreement with Arizona State University, a settlement to which the Department of Justice was a party.  In June 2010, the Departments of Justice and Education jointly conveyed correspondence to universities that expressed it would be a violation of the civil rights panoply of the ADA and §504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 for universities to provide inaccessible e-books.  The Departments urged universities not to acquire, deploy, or have students utilize this form of emerging technology until it was accessible to all students.  Furthermore, WCL will have, in 2011, a conference concerning students with disabilities, a component of which will be focused on technology issues.

In sum, as our civic society advances technologically but also concomitantly seeks to fulfill the promise of civil rights panoply, issues of this sort will be at the forefront of public discussion and even, when necessary, litigation.

Links

http://www.readingrights.org/458

http://www.readingrights.org/kindle-tts-issue

http://john.foliot.ca/unauthorized/samuelbagenstos.html

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/January/10-crt-030.html

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-20100629.html

WCL Dean Goes Head to Head with Leading Conservative Against Same-Sex Marriage - Part 2

This link is a follow-up to the previous post about WCL Dean, law professor, and former TMA advisor, Tony Varona's weekend at St. John's University symposium on the subject. This post dissects his panel debate against Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage.

WCL Dean Brews a Case for DOMA Repeal at Law Conference Over Weekend - Part 1

Professor of Law, Academic Dean at WCL, and former TMA faculty advisor, Tony Varona, is writing a two-post series on the well-known blog, Pam's House Blend, about the Defense of Marriage Act's (DOMA) repeal.

The first blog in the series discusses former U.S. Congressman's Bob Barr's recent call for DOMA's repeal. His new post, coming soon, will offer insight into his panel debate with Maggie Gallagher, of the National Organization for Marriage, which took place this past weekend, and whom Pam describes as "the grande dame of discrimination."