"Twenty officers have been relieved of command by the Navy this year". Read more: Navy cmdr gets prison in rape of 2 female officers - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee Navy cmdr gets prison in rape of 2 female officers - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee Abner
There was, from what I've read of the case, an appalling sequence of events where: Mark Seldes, an Air Force major and flight surgeon, basically an Air Force occupational medicine physician, was convicted in court-martial of raping a woman while she was unconscious. At sentencing, his military attorney pleaded for leniency. From The Stars and Stripes: "Padalino told the jury to consider Seldes’ 16 years in the Air Force, his family, and the fact that he was losing his medical career." After briefly going missing, he returned or was found. With this bit about losing his medical career having been put to the court at sentencing, he served three years in prison and was dismissed from the service. This year, he showed up in Florida and applied for a civilian medical license. When it came before the Florida Board of Medicine, arguments made in his favor included that he had served his time, and that his career had been destroyed. The Board of Medicine voted to give him a medical license, nullifying that destroyed career thing, which was also the argument for a sentence that, for rape, doesn't seem very long. To the best of my knowledge, he didn't go back and serve some more time voluntarily to make up for any compassion he may have been showed on account of that destroyed-career argument. There are restrictions, yes. The main restriction seems to be, umm, that he work under supervision in a government facility.*He indicated an interest in working for the VA. Commenter Magpie30 here notes: "The number of female veterans who have suffered Military Sexual Trauma during their service is huge. Having already been betrayed by those we are supposed to be able to trust above all others, the idea of this man working with us when we are at our most vulnerable is, if nothing else, a second betrayal of trust." I once heard thoughtful small town criminal defense lawyer who became a parliamentarian, and who was considered one of the most left-wing politicians elected in Canada, fwiw - talk about corrections. He proposed, at least as a thought experiment, that maybe there should be, more or less, two sentences – a really short one, and a really long one. And a large number of people in the middle right now would get the shorter one. But a few more people than are getting a long sentence now would get the really long one. There may be something to this.
