SNAFU scuttles press coverage of Navy court-martial

Via the NIMJ web site, here's a link to an article from the Virginian-Pilot about a contested judge-alone attempted murder court-martial tried at Norfolk last week.

Proceedings began on Tuesday, when the military judge continued the case until January with the possibility of returning on the record sooner if a PTA was reached. Following the continuance, a Virginian-Pilot reporter asked a PAO to inform her of any developments in the case. Contrary to initial expectations, the case actually proceeded to trial on Wednesday. But apparently the PAO wasn't informed that the case had resumed until Friday, when the case had already resulted in a conviction and sentencing proceedings were underway. And because the PAO didn't know the case had restarted, neither did the reporters who were attempting to follow it.

Mistakes happen. But one must wonder whether a culture of insularity contributed to this mistake. After all, if public and press access to proceedings is a core value of a system, a mistake like this is less likely to occur than if public and press access is viewed as a necessary evil. And if a particular office has a close working relationship with the base PAO, it is far less likely that the office would forget to notify the PAO when plans change than if dealings with the PAO are infrequent and/or unwelcome.

Interestingly, the Tully Center for Free Speech's recent empirical study of the availability of public information about court-martial proceedings (which we discussed here) found that the Navy provided less information about court-martial proceedings than any other branch of the military.