Music Banter - View Single Post - should they have locked this guy up?
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Old 03-05-2010, 08:52 PM   #4 (permalink)
Freebase Dali
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I don't know much about the British army, but from what I could glean from the news article, it sounds like things run about parallel to the US army. Not sure of the British army's justice system, but the US uses UCMJ and it's stipulated that missing movement, desertion, AWOL, etc... is most definitely punishable by jail time.

Regardless of how the higher-ups in command treated the soldier, his actions (PTSD or not) will still be punished. If there's an investigation launched against the people who bullied him, that's all well and good but I don't see it affecting the soldier's sentence at all. It wouldn't affect a soldier's sentence in the US army, and it seems as though the British army have a similar operating procedure, so I'd expect there to be the same general outcome.

Whether the guy's PTSD was causation enough for his AWOL decision is debatable at best. First, was he previously diagnosed by a military therapist? If not, the military is going to use that against him. If so, he probably shouldn't have been deployable in the first place... but command decisions regarding that kind of thing usually involve job placement consideration to keep the soldier doing a duty that won't be detrimental to his/her recovery, which he should be actively involved in, with therapy, if he wants anyone to take his PTSD claim seriously.
Any developed military provides physical and mental health help and they make their soldiers aware of this constantly, so for a soldier to try and justify a crime with an illness without ever previously trying to get help is overwhelmingly a military win in this situation.
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