Navy Justice
An examination of the seaborne service's scandal-ridden police agency
Not only homosexuals are investigated under the military's unusual sex laws. Under certain circumstances, adultery and heterosexual contact are vigorously prosecuted, with results that many civilians would find abhorrent. Last April, Marine Lt. Frank Reister was sentenced to seven years in military prison for womanizing. He was convicted of consensual heterosexual oral sex, fraternization and six counts of adultery and conspiracy to commit adultery. Reister was also convicted of assault--for having sex while infected with herpes. Much of the evidence against Reister was found on two pages of a personal diary he kept in his house, where, on Jan. 18, 1989, he decided to list his "conquests." Some of the affairs occurred when he was married.
Reister certainly had marital difficulties, but his legal trouble did not start until after his divorce, when he dated a Navy nurse whom he asked to take care of his house while he went on vacation. While Reister was away, the nurse discovered his diary and read of Reister's affairs. She went to the NIS and told them she had been raped.
The NIS, accompanied by a Navy prosecutor and the nurse, went to Reister's house and gathered his bedsheet and photographed the "conquest" pages of his diary. Later, they returned with a search warrant and seized condoms, adult playing cards and a prescription for medicine for the treatment of herpes. Using the information in Reister's diary, NIS agents tracked down five women and his ex-wife. The Navy nurse's testimony at Reister's court-martial was not convincing enough to convict him of rape, so the charge was downgraded to consensual sodomy, a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Today, Reister remains in prison while his lawyer, David Dowell, appeals the conviction. Dowell questions whether NIS agents legally should ever have had access to the diary.
NIS targets from admirals to seamen complain that agents often make up their minds in advance about a person's guilt or innocence, then build a case to support their theories. "What they do," says Dan Hyatt, a decorated Navy enlisted man who rejoined the service in 1981 as a prosecutor and a defender, "is they interview 15 people. And if the potential witnesses have something favorable to say, they won't reduce it to a sworn statement; they will just produce a memo that the person has nothing to offer. So you end up with a pile of evidence on a guy that does not have anything favorable in it, and people are accused where they should never be accused in the first place."
Conflicting statements. Once again, there is evidence to suggest these are not isolated instances. One witness in the case of Ralph Bernard, a veteran Navy weapons engineer who has been investigated by the NIS for nearly a year and a half but not yet charged with a crime (story, Page 63), says that an NIS agent only took notes when he told the agent things that fit the agent's criminal theory. Kathy Kubicina, the sister of Clayton Hartwig, whom the Navy accused of blowing up the USS Iowa, examined a report of her interview with NIS agents line by line. Kubicina says she noted 25 statements in the report that she did not utter. The NIS's Robert Powers says the references cited by Kubicina were "not very flattering to Kathy and her family and her brother" and that she disputes them for that reason. "That's not unusual," Powers says. "It happens all the time."
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