Why We Need Grand Juries

MILITARY “JUSTICE” SYSTEM IGNORES CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS

by Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III

(Jul. 7, 2013) —[Editor’s Note:  The following interview with Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III expands on The Post & Email’s previous discussion of the court-martial of Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins, III in 2007 and the military discipline system in general, which lacks a grand jury review of criminal charges against its members.

On June 26, Hutchins’s conviction was overturned for the second time by a military appeals court based on the finding that he was unconstitutionally denied an attorney when first questioned after the incident in Hamdania, Iraq, where he allegedly killed an unarmed Iraqi man along with seven other service members.

CDR Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III was court-martialed 23 years ago for a contrived crime in which the accuser, Adm. John Bitoff, was also the convening authority of the proceedings, which violated the rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).  A confession letter with Fitzpatrick’s forged and misspelled signature was placed in his file and buried for years, and the court-martial destroyed Fitzpatrick’s opportunity for advancement.  Prior to the bogus charges being brought, Fitzpatrick had been approved and was preparing to attend the Naval War College in Providence, RI.

An investigator for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), James H. Connolly, who questioned Hutchins after he was arrested in 2006, is the same man who went to Fitzpatrick’s home in Silverdale, WA in 2004 with three other agents and threatened Fitzpatrick’s life if he were to continue his attempts to expose the corruption and criminality behind his staged court-martial.  Fitzpatrick reported the incident to the FBI and NCIS, but nothing was done to his knowledge.

During questioning, Hutchins signed a confession document which the military Court of Appeals ruled had denied Hutchins his Fifth Amendment rights.  In its ruling, the appeals court questioned the “fairness” of the military justice system and the alleged “unlawful command influence” in Hutchins’s case.]

The grand jury is the last resort in the peaceful resolution and reconciliation of our Constitution:  Is it the law of the land or not?

The work facing a grand jury at this point is overwhelming in many respects, and it’s going to take us a long time to get these problems fixed if we are able to recover at all using a peaceful grand jury protocol.  If a grand jury were to go after any one of the government’s people for their outrageous abuses against our citizenry, once it starts doing its job…How about a grand jury investigating the Internal Revenue Service?

One of the ways it has been demonstrated to us is that the grand jury comes forward and acts against any one of these criminal actors that we know about, and the judiciary says “No,” as they did with the ambushed grand jury.

Larry Klayman, to his credit, is talking about citizens’ grand juries, but we have standing grand juries at the federal level that can stand up, have the foreman come forward and say, “OK, we’re going to look at this” and actually take these people to task.  Then we’ll get the attention of the Congress, and they will understand what their work is in serving their constituents.  It will be exampled to them through the actions of a grand jury.  That is what a grand jury was meant to do.

Why wasn’t a grand jury involved in the investigation portion of the case against Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.?  At the beginning of June, Randy (Duke) Cunningham was released from prison after seven years; he used to be a congressman from California.  Was a grand jury involved in that?

Is a grand jury looking at the IRS on its own authority?  Is a grand jury looking into the actions of Attorney General Eric Holder?  Instead of Eric Holder standing there and saying, “I’m going to investigate myself,” how about a grand jury coming forward and saying, “Not so fast, Mr. Attorney General.  You’re being served with a subpoena to come and testify before the Washington, DC grand jury which has been assembled by a guy named Judge Royce Lamberth.  It’s the same people that Lamberth is preventing us from going to with the charge of treason against Obama which has now been sitting in place since 2009.

If a grand jury gets involved in any of these things, it will change everything.  And with that, it will change the way that congressmen see the world when they get up in the morning and go to work.  The way to force congressmen to do their job and punish them when they’re not doing their job – for example, when they violate the rules of the Constitution – the job of the grand jury becomes prominent.

There are people who have committed crimes which can still be prosecuted today.  The forgery of my name is still being represented as an authentic writing, which means that every other crime committed underneath it or along with it is still actionable.  That forgery is held by two people:  Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert and Judge Advocate General of the Navy Nanette DeRenzi.  For them to speak out is to condemn and act against the system that they have nurtured from within.  They’ve succeeded in this system of government, and it’s treated them right nicely, thank you very much.  Anybody in a position to stand against it does not want to get hammered.  They don’t want to get involved.  And it’s a whole bunch of people.

Regarding Sgt. Hutchins, I had been contacted and was prepared to testify in San Diego at his court-martial against James H. Connolly and to report him within a year or so after he came to threaten me with his team of colleagues.  That would have changed his testimony completely, and it would have called into question anything he had to say.

When I found out that Kevin Anderson was the man who forged my name to that confession document, Kevin Anderson was working as a civilian deputy prosecuting attorney in Kitsap County, WA.  He was there in 2004 and 2005 when it became known to me that he claimed authorship of the forged document.  In a report that he gave to a police detective, Beth Etheridge, he said, “I’m the author of that document.”  I moved up to Washington State before Anderson did with his family; Anderson followed me.  It became demonstrable in 2004 and 2005 that he was, in fact, the guy who authored the document that bears my forged and misspelled name.  Neither Kevin Anderson nor Tim Zeller, who was the admiral’s attorney, nor the admiral himself, can explain the chain of custody of that document.  There is a chain of custody, but it doesn’t involve me.  I’ve never seen the original; I’ve never touched it; I’ve never been in the same room with it.  But the people who have been have not yet been put upon to reconcile the ghost witness, LCDR Dolan.  Because it’s irreconcilable, then take a look at the dead man in the Sgt. Hutchins case.  So now the burden goes back to them to prove that this man actually existed in the murder of which Sgt. Hutchins is accused.  And the same thing for the court-martial of Sgt. Ray Girouard.

How about those memos that were exchanged behind closed doors, which is completely illegal?  John Bitoff was not allowed to be the officer to assemble or convene my court-martial.  He was required to kick it up the chain of command, and he did not.  And he knew that.  We have so many self-incriminating documents in the 23-year-old court-martial that it becomes laughable.  And there is the forgery.  Reconcile the ghost in my case; reconcile the ghost in Hutchins’s case.  Reconcile the back-and-forth documentation in either case.  Reconcile the forgery of my name which makes the Navy and the Marine Corps “look really bad.”  Why hasn’t that been reconciled? It’s still a question today, and the original exists.  The chief of Naval Operations, Jonathan Greenert, my classmate at the Naval Academy, and Judge Advocate General of the Navy, Nanette DeRenzi, still have that document under their control.

Greenert has command over DeRenzi.  DeRenzi has to follow his orders. She is not an operational commander, but she is accountable to one.  The military discipline is a function of command, and the lawyers are only advisory in nature in the way that these commanding officers command.  Jonathan Greenert can call DeRenzi and say, “Release him. Release Sgt. Hutchins.  Give him back pay, benefits; provide him remedy and relief.  And by the way, do the same thing with CDR Fitzpatrick.  And by the way, we’re going to call Adm. John Bitoff, who is still on retirement pay, back to active duty and inquire into what he did, and in the meantime, encourage a grand jury from someplace in the country to take up the same issue on the civilian side.”  Wow.

So isn’t it now time, after 25 years, to pick this thing up and actually start looking into the efficacy, the integrity, the trustworthiness of this discipline system in the context of the court-martial of Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III where we find so many DNA markers of how a court-martial really works?  We don’t have a better example of how a court-martial works than what John Bitoff did with his two JAGs, Tim Zeller and Kevin Anderson.  And what was the chain of custody with the forgery?  We know that Anderson had it and that he forged my name to it and misspelled my name in doing it.  The original is now in the possession of Nanette DeRenzi and Jonathan Greenert.  It’s still there.  They have the original document.  And we have proof of that:  there is the “certified true copy” with the ribbon tied through it…the Navy said, “Yes, we have the original.”  Well, OK, now reconcile that forgery and connect it to me in any way, and they can’t do it.  And that, right there, undoes the court-martial.  And they’ve kept this under wraps for 23 years.

They’re not going to accept responsibility for what they did to the point where they will dispatch a team of federal agents to your home and threaten your life if you continue to do what you’ve been doing.