But alas, that will likely not be the case and Larkin will be convicted on the word of Obama and the MSM that he was a Natural Born Citizen.
It saddens me that Lakin has made this error. I believe he thought he could force the system to reveal Obama’s credentials by his refusal to deploy. What he forgot was that there are strict legal standards about failing to deploy that have been in place for generations. The most critical issue is that the Manual for Courts Martial says that any order should be presumed to legal without absolutely clear evidence that it is not. It also suggests that a questionable order delivered through the normally official chain are to be considered legal orders.
Did Ltc Lakin have questions? Yep. But, was the order delivered through the chain that he otherwise responds to with obedience? Yes.
The proper avenue would have been to obey the deployment orders while registering a challenge.
And that is the fatal error of the judge and the grounds for appeal.
“I would think that the burden of proof would be on the Military to show that it was a lawful order...”
I imagine the military’s burden will be to show that Larkin refused to obey a lawful order to report for duty. I doubt they will get to the question of O’s birth certificate.
Suppose every soldier had the right to force the government to prove that every officer in the chain of command was legally holding his office before the soldier was required to obey the order. Might slow things down a bit.
In a military court of law, orders are presumed to be lawful and are disobeyed at the legal peril of the service member, per the MCM. IOW, the burden of proof falls to the defendant to prove that the orders were illegal, so long as whatever ordered isn't facially illegal - to be understood clearly as a criminal act.
Yes, I realize that probably doesn't make sense to people who live a legal world where the state bears the burden of proving its case, but the military legal world is not the civilian legal world, and this is one of the differences.