THE LAW: We Want Them Accountable

On March 9, 1953, Mrs. Clarice Covert, an American citizen who had accompanied her U.S. Air Force husband on his assignment to Britain, told a psychiatrist that she was “just going to explode.” Next day she exploded: she hacked Master Sergeant Edward Covert to death with an ax as he lay sleeping in their Heyfort home.

Under a previous agreement with the U.S. applying to crimes by civilians with the U.S. Armed Forces, Britain had waived its right to try Clarice Covert in its civil courts. She was sentenced to life imprisonment by a U.S. Air Force court-martial which acted under a section in the 1950 Uniform Code of Military Justice giving jurisdiction to military tribunals over “all persons serving with, employed by or accompanying” the U.S. Armed Forces overseas. Last week in Washington, Federal District Judge Edward A. Tamm declared that section of the Uniform Code to be unconstitutional and ordered Mrs. Covert set free.

Legal Sanctuary? Judge Tamm made his ruling on the basis of the recent decision in the case of Robert Toth (TIME, Nov. 21), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that ex-servicemen cannot be tried by court-martial for crimes committed while in the armed forces. If the military thus has no jurisdiction over civilians who were at one time in the service, said Judge Tamm, then the military obviously has no jurisdiction over “persons who were civilians all the time.”

Judge Tamm acknowledged the fact that his ruling, if upheld by higher courts, would cause major problems for the armed forces. It surely would. There are more than 265,000 dependents overseas with American servicemen, along with nearly 142,000 civilian employees of the armed forces. All these would seem to be placed in a sort of legal sanctuary by Judge Tamm’s projection of the Toth decision. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons estimates that the Tamm ruling could free at least 50 persons who, like Mrs. Covert, were civilians overseas with the armed forces and therefore beyond the reach of the U.S. civil courts at the time they committed their crimes. Among these is Mrs. Dorothy Krueger Smith (daughter of General Walter Krueger, Sixth Army commander in the Pacific during World War II), who is now serving a life sentence for the murder in Japan of her husband, Colonel Aubrey D. Smith.

The Hand of the Thief? As Government lawyers sat down last week to figure out their appeal from the Tamm decision and to consider the ruling’s possible effects, they developed more questions than answers. Among them: ¶ If U.S. military courts cannot try civilians abroad, who can? The U.S. may give back to the foreign countries which have surrendered it by treaty, jurisdiction over American civilians with its armed forces. But would such revision meet American standards of justice? For example, should an American national be forced to stand trial before a French Communist judge? Or should a U.S. citizen receive punishment under Islamic law (in Saudi Arabia, the penalty for thievery is the hand of the thief)?

¶ Under some circumstances, such as the collapse of civil government by reason of war, e.g., South Korea in 1950, the nation in which the crime is committed can hardly exercise effective jurisdiction even if it has the apparent right. And how, if not by the U.S. military, can an armed forces civilian dependent or employee be tried for a crime committed at some such remote outpost as Thule in Greenland, where the Danish government holds title but has none of the local machinery for exercising judicial control?

Both Judge Tamm in the Covert case and the Supreme Court in its Toth decision suggested a possible solution to the dilemma. The Congress, they said, could enact legislation giving the U.S. civil courts jurisdiction over certain civilians abroad who are exempted, by treaty or otherwise, from the jurisdiction of local courts. As a Defense Department spokesman said last week, in referring to the armed forces dependents and employees overseas: “They are U.S. citizens and we cannot leave them free to go their merry way with no accountability. We want all our people accountable somewhere.”