Warbird Information Exchange

From the WIX Legal Division. Thought this would be of interest to some here.

Yesterday the US Supreme Court affirmed the unconstitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act of 2006, which criminalized lying about having received military decorations, with certain exceptions.

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1 ... reno64-wsj

August

While I may somewhat agree that the Stolen Valor act may be an extremely harsh response to a growing (and very serious) problem, Congress only enacted the law after it was discovered by a veteran's group that the misrepresentation of military honors by a citizen cannot be tried under any of the criminal fraud statutes nor civilly under the defamation statutes, making it very difficult to have any legal force be placed on someone whom misrepresents themselves intentionally with regards to military achievements and/or service for the purpose of furthering themselves. I think that the court in its case is ignoring the specific limits and criteria of the law and extending it beyond those limits to be able to rule that it is unconstitutional and/or sets poor legal precedent. The First Amendment isn't absolute. It ends when it damages another. Claiming to have earned military honors or achievements not actually earned not only damages the military and its servicemen both current and former, but it damages the public at large whom have no immediate way of determining the veracity of the claim and will most likely believe them to the eventual detriment of the public. It's been ruled in the past that it is indeed legal to make laws to prohibit or restrict such activities, so why now change that precedence, especially in light of the fact that the Court just a couple days ago ruled that it was not going to go against prior precedence in the Affordable Healthcare Act.

CAPFlyer, you got some of that right, and of course you're entitled to your opinion on some other points. Factually, however, what the court found was that:

(1) Lying about having received military decorations IS punishable as fraud or defamation if it meets the other critera for being fraud or decoration. There is no need to outlaw lying about a particular subject matter to enforce these laws.

(2) Lying about having received military decorations is not a serious problem outside of the areas, such as fraud, where it is already illegal. It may cause emotional offense to some, but free speech rights almost always trump that amorphous type of harm. There is no evidence that it harms the prestige of those who really were decorated, any more than the same defendant's lies about having played hockey for the Detroit Red Wings harm the prestige of the Red Wings. In most cases of lying there is no legally cognizable harm to the public at large, or really to anyone. Being deceived, without more, is not being harmed.

(3) The law didn't have enough limits and criteria -- that was its problem. If you claimed you won a medal to a woman at a bar to get her to sleep with you, that was a federal crime. If you whispered it to your 8-year-old grandson, federal crime. The court suggested that a more limited statute might be constitutional.

(4) The govt is required to consider less restrictive alternatives before legislating a content-based restriction on speech. Anyone with a smartphone can check the veracity of someone's claim to have been received the MoH in minutes, anytime, anywhere. The court pointed out that the govt could make this even easier by posting an official database rather than people having to check private databases. Anyway, in today's information age, anyone making a false claim of this kind is unmasked almost immediately, as this defendant was.

(5) The decision sticks with precedent in that the constitution hasn't permitted content-based restrictions on speech unless it seems very likely to injure people in a material way (e.g. child porrnn, with its potential for commercial exploitation of kids, even kidnapping, slavery etc.) or incite physical violence (e.g. fighting words).

As the court said, the govt has an interest in protecting the honor of those who fought for the country, but it must do so in ways consistent with the freedoms for which they fought.

August

"Anyway, in today's information age, anyone making a false claim of this kind is unmasked almost immediately, as this defendant was."

Not so much August. For sure with the MOH. But the others? Not really.

I'm still in the Army and I can tell you right now we have no idea if a Soldier does or does not have a particular award...before 2005. That was when IPERMs went digital. Before that each Soldier received a yearly statement saying what awards they had received. And it was notoriously incomplete.

To illustrate; we had long service soldier that claimed a Silver Star, two Bronze with "v"s, and a Purple heart; from Vietnam. It wasn't on his 2-1. It wasn't in his 201 ( since done away with). It wasn't on any data base we could find.

Now this guy was kinda.......a jerk. So the Major was all about using this to end his career. To make a long story short I had to get copies of his awards and even contact his former Commanding officer. Sure enough it was all real.

While I was doing this I had extensive conversations with Personal. It seems that when they gave you all those copies of your award orders; back in the day, no one kept a paper copy. The Soldier is expected to keep his copy. There is no wherehouse with a paper copy of every award order ever given by the Army. Some were microfilmed,and some were not. Those that were microfilmed....well those micofilms that can be found...are irrelevant. There are no machines left in Army inventory to read them....

I think it's unfortunate that a record of all awards where not kept prior to 2005.
An individuals achievements in the service of there country should be maintained for posterity.

139,
A part that some are forgetting is;
Fires in document centers and the fact that hundreds of miles of records from Viet Nam are encripted on media that no one can find an antique computer to down load from since it was a military system and as soon as the next cool thing came along, all the existing computer stuff went into the grinder because it was 'sensitive material' and no one had the brain power to think 'hey- what about....'

_________________
Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

It's just as bad with the volunteer organizations like CAP and USCG Aux as well. Considering they use the same record keeping system and authorization methods, it's not surprising. While I wouldn't compare the two normally, we do have some awards that are for pretty serious things like saving lives, and it's always interesting to see how hard it can be at times to even get them awarded much less be able to verify that someone actually earned it.

Thank you for the clarification.
Fires happen, but the lack of a suitable technology to read them can be over come.
Trying to read and then decrypt that information sounds like an interesting non for profit project.