News Watch

Workshop Aims to Train Lawyers To
Counsel Reluctant Soldiers

December 22, 2003
By Thomas Adcock
New York Law Journal

A workshop for attorneys and law students interested in working with the national G.I. Rights Hotline to advise soldiers who go AWOL or reservists who balk at extended tours in Iraq will be offered next month by the Military Task Force of the National Lawyer's Guild.

The workshop, titled "Support Our Troops, Not the Pentagon: a G.I. Rights Primer," will be held Jan. 27, 6 to 9 p.m., in the Wellington Conference Center at New York Law School, 47 Worth St.

Colin Starger, a guild member and coordinator of the event, said a panel of experts in the arcane details of military law was being assembled. "The military is rife with regulations and directives, but it's not very good about explaining rights of release," said Mr. Starger, 34, a recent graduate of Columbia Law School. "When you join, it's basically an eight-year commitment, divided between full-time and reserve time. The process for getting out is very, very complicated."

To some degree, that complexity has led to an uptick in activity at the G.I. Rights Hotline, a counseling service sponsored by a network of pacifist groups around the country, including the War Resisters League in New York. The hotline has forwarded more than 100 calls to the War Resisters — most from soldiers in Iraq, or on leave from assignment there, inquiring about penalties for desertion.

Joe Burlas of the Army Public Affairs Office said that penalty is "basically five years' confinement if there's an intent to avoid hazardous duty." Nonetheless, some 3,800 soldiers deserted last year, and more than 5,000 deserted in 2001. Family members convicted of harboring deserters face a maximum three years' federal imprisonment.

Those within the military who file for conscientious objector status likewise face harsh consequences. In a recent case, Lance Corporal Stephen Funk, attached to a New Orleans unit of the Marine Corps, was acquitted by a military court of desertion, but convicted of unauthorized absence and sentenced to six months at the Camp Lejeune brig in North Carolina, reduction in rank to private, forfeiture of two-thirds pay for six months, and a bad-conduct discharge.

Lawyers who take part in the guild workshop could become counselors for the G.I. Rights Hotline, which Mr. Starger said neither advocates a political position on the war in Iraq nor encourages political opinion from client callers. "The purpose of [guild] training is as much educational as specifically practical," said Mr. Starger, whose activism in prisoner rights issues led him to become a lawyer. He now works as a staff attorney for the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. "If people knew about [military] rights a little more, there might be a little less acceptance of authority and a little more thinking that could lead to clarity and justice."
 
 
 

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