The Army has opened a new school at Fort Belvoir in Virginia that is designed to provide advanced training to military lawyers, including defense attorneys.
Classes began May 9 at the center, which offers troops in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps, known as judge advocates, an opportunity to gain supplemental training on important legal issues.
The Army Advocacy Center is a first for the Department of Defense and is modeled after the Department of Justice's national advocacy center in Columbia, South Carolina.
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A multipart investigative series published last month by The War Horse website found the military justice system in the Marine Corps to be seriously broken, with defense counsel facing threats to their careers simply from doing their jobs and battling repeated efforts to circumvent due process for defendants. Advocates have described similar concerns about the defense counsel provided in other services in recent years.
A report last year by the Army JAG Corps to the American Bar Association found there are approximately 1,885 active-duty Army judge advocates but only 148 active-duty troops serving as military defense counsel for the service.
The limited number of military defense attorneys, and a history of defense counsel serving under the same command as military prosecutors, has at times created…
