Real courts martial don’t follow Perry Mason or Tom Cruise scripts.
And Navy prosecutors can be as overreaching as any on earth. That’s no coincidence, it’s Navy culture. The Navy itself, you see, is never stupid or sloppy; if anything goes wrong, their first response is to hunt for a scapegoat (see a list of examples here).
For example, when a battleship gun turret exploded and killed 47 sailors in 1989, the Navy blamed one of the dead sailors, painting him as both homosexual and suicidal, even though there’s no evidence he was either (see details here).
The same thing happened when the Navy lost a $1.2 billion ship to a fire two years ago. The investigations revealed leadership failures and negligence, such as training and equipment deficiencies, piles of combustible materials left by workmen in the area where the fire started, and disabled fire suppression systems (see details here).
But on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, and without a shred of physical evidence, they prosecuted a Navy seaman for arson.
“During a nine-day trial at California’s Naval Base San Diego, military prosecutors argued that 21-year-old Ryan Mays ignited the USS Bonhomme Richard on purpose in the summer of 2020 because he was upset that he had dropped out of Navy Seal training,” the Guardian says (see story here), a purported motive so lame and flimsy no novelist would use it in a plot.
When I first read about this case, I feared for him; I didn’t know whether he was guilty or innocent, but I knew something about the Navy, and didn’t feel confident he would get a fair trial or verdict, even though the case against him wouldn’t get a conviction in a civilian court. To put things in context, Navy officers’ expertise is fighting wars, not weighing evidence in criminal cases.
The Navy judge acquitted him. Read story here. But he’ll never receive full justice. He can’t stay in the Navy; his military career is over. And the taint of having been accused may always follow him. The Navy has claimed another victim.
But he can take a small comfort from having company. The reprimands and censures traveled up and down the chain of command. At least 20 other Navy personnel had their careers ruined, too. And unlike Mays, some of them probably deserved it.