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Army cooperates with W.Va. in murder case
HUNTINGTON -- The Army will allow West Virginia to prosecute two alleged deserters accused of killing a Huntington minister before pursuing its own disciplinary action.
The Army is putting its own charges "on the back burner," Wayne County Sheriff David Pennington said Friday.
The Army says Spc. Daniel Smith, 22, of Newport News, Va., and Pfc. Stephen Wilson, 19, of Cincinnati went AWOL in early May from Fort Drum in New York, where they served as infantrymen with the 10th Mountain Division. Smith and Wilson are charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of the Rev. Mark McCalla at the Beech Fork Wildlife Management Area shooting range on June 19.
While he couldn't comment on Smith and Wilson specifically, Fort Drum public information officer Capt. Fredrick Harrell said the Army typically court-martials deserters -- soldiers who have been AWOL for more than 30 days -- under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Right now, however, the Army is cooperating with West Virginia authorities in the murder investigation, Harrell said.
It's no surprise that the Army would forego worrying about prosecuting Smith and Wilson right away.
Despite a rise in desertions from the Army as the Iraq war drags on into a fifth year, the U.S. military does almost nothing to find those who flee and rarely prosecutes those it gets its hands on, according to an Associated Press examination of Pentagon data.
The data show that 174 troops were court-martialed by the Army in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2006 -- a figure that amounts to just 5 percent of the 3,301 soldiers who deserted in fiscal year 2006. The figures are about 1 percent or less for the Navy and the Marines, according to data obtained by the AP under the Freedom of Information Act.
Some deserters are simply allowed to return to their units, while the majority are discharged in non-criminal proceedings on less-than-honorable terms.
Pentagon officials say that while the all-volunteer military is stretched thin by the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of deserters represents an extremely small percentage of the armed forces, and it would be a poor use of time to go after them, particularly when there is a war on.
As a result, the Pentagon does little more than enter deserters' names into an FBI national criminal database.
In most cases, as long as a deserter stays out of trouble -- as long as, say, police don't pull him over for speeding and run his name through the computer -- he is in little danger of getting caught.
