Posted on 02/11/2010 3:08:23 PM PST by NormsRevenge
A single mother from Oakland has been discharged from the Army for refusing to leave her infant son behind to go to Afghanistan, but she will not be court-martialed, her attorney said Thursday.
Alexis Hutchinson, 21, had faced criminal charges at a court-martial for refusing to accompany her unit when it deployed in November. Although that is no longer a prospect, Hutchinson has been demoted from specialist to private and will lose all military and veteran benefits, said her attorney, Rae Sue Sussman of San Francisco.
She said Hutchinson had been given an other-than-honorable discharge.
In a statement, Hutchinson said she was "excited to know what will happen to me, and that I am not facing jail. This means I can still be with my son, which is the most important thing."
Hutchinson enlisted in the Army in 2007 straight out of Fremont High School in East Oakland. She was supposed to deploy overseas as a cook with her unit, the 3rd Infantry Division, on Nov. 5. She skipped the flight, she contended, because she had nobody to take care of her then-10-month-old son, Kamani.
Hutchinson told her commanding officers she had arranged for her mother to watch Kamani while she was away for her one-year tour of duty, but when that fell through at the last minute, she could find no alternative.
In January, the Army charged her with four court-martial counts. She could have spent up to two years behind bars had she been convicted of being absent without leave, missing a movement, dereliction of duty and insubordinate conduct toward a noncommissioned officer.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Yes indeedy.
No, not at all. She could apply for an upgrade, but she would have to show exceptional circumstances and it's a long process, involving years.
If it could be done, no guarantees, she'd need to become a stellar citizen and mother, sustaining the effort over years, to show she was going through an aberrant bad patch when she failed to deploy. Even then, I'm not sure she could do it.
If she goes back to Oakland and goes on welfare, fuggetaboutit. She would have have no chance at an upgrade.
Stain on the kid for what his mother did? How frickin’ medieval of you. I thought we had moved on from blaming the children for the parents mistakes. There is no stain on the child, only on the mother and father.
Deserting isn't the right thing. She should have found a sitter, other soldiers do it, male and female. Refusing to deploy is a very serious offense and she should have gone to levenworth AND a dishonorable, not other than honoarable, discharge, IMO. That is the penalty. How do you think she would have cared for the baby while in prison for 2 years? She wasn't thinking of her baby, she was using it and got lucky she wasn't jailed.
How progressive of you
You have rationalized surrendering the language like a true liberal
DITTO!!
Gotta watch out for those military guys... LOL...
Yes, exactly.
Yes but you know that is a very big myth. Just like was said, everyone seems to think it works that way.
I don’t know the origin, but it may be from the staff telling the troops,
nah don’t worry about it. You can upgrade in 6 months. It nothing. Just a guess, but yes, this is a very widespread belief.
Actually I do, but I don’t want the person watching my son’s back to be someone who doesn’t have their head somewhere else. That doesn’t exactly scream team player either.
Cindie
Think of the new opportunities this would provide for otherwise hopeless, unemployable youth, who do not qualify for regular service, and so are denied any opportunity for benefits.
Think of the opportunities for a whole new Pentagon bureaucracy; building, suppling, & equiping contracts; a whole new corps of lobbyists; a new source of graft....
Good. All females in the military should have implants of birth control.
Who knows where urban legends like that come from? There sure seem to be a lot of them. An OTH is a very serious thing, but then it does beat hard time in Leavenworth.
When they place men & women together what do they expect, they should somehow turn off their natural urges? Just more Feministas' Epic Fail.
Have you ever looked around and wondered why there are so many young & healthy males around who could be in the service but are not? Well, why should they when gals will be recruited to take their place.
She knew what she was getting into. She signed a contract she understood and broke the rules.
Women should have equal rights and equal rules.
I say, enforce those rules.
No excuses. Throw her in jail like a man.
I remember visiting my older brother at Camp Pendleton back in 1958, prior to his deployment.
There was a separate WACs barracks with nothing but pregnant WACs waiting for their "Convenience of the Government" (or Bad Conduct, depending on circumstaces) Discharges for just that very thing.
Go up on 3 articles and walk with an OTH. Yea that’s bad, but as Whoopi explained, its not bad-bad.
That’s one thing certain about the military. No matter how bad things are, it can ALWAYs get worse.
I can’t really get a read on this. Too many things are unknown. It is interesting though. And there will be (prolly already is) fallout.
LOL! Isn't that the truth!
I cant really get a read on this. Too many things are unknown.
Yep. I'm sure there are dynamics we don't know about, like what kind of soldier was she, did her unit just want to be rid of her, was she a discipline problem, had there been other problems with childcare, were there really not any other family alternatives . . . . There's usually a "rest of the story" that doesn't make the press.
Still, her getting an OTH should be a warning that single motherhood is not an A Ticket out of the service.
A little arithmetic shows that she probably got pregnant some 18 months into her enlistment.
There was always a lot of that. Not to mention that many of those young ladies were found to have thousands, even 10s of thousands, in their possession.
I prefer to be deployed without females. They are complicated and a distraction. This is a “preference” not sexism or any of that stuff.
Women on a sub is a recipe for chaos. After your out for a few weeks, a woman can just walk by you, not even look at you, not speak, but just walk by, and smell so freakin good, it would cause a “complication”.
And that’s really the question. Why insert a distraction in a forward deployed unit. I don’t get it? Is there some unique need to have women on the front. Is there some skill they have that a male does not have? (no sex jokes) So it boils down to, why?
But hey that’s just me.
Then she shouldn’t have joined the military. People are treating the military as just another job.
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