Here’s a fascinating article from Joint Forces Quarterly by Marine judge advocate Linsday Rodman that, among other worthy points, analyzes the 19,000 statistic that is frequently — though, as the article demonstrates, misleadingly — cited as the annual number of sexual assaults in the military.
The article also discussed the overprosecution problem — the phenomanon of convening authorities referring weak sexual assault cases to trial, sometimes despite contrary advise from their legal advisors. Such overprosecution, the article notes, has the perverse effect of increasing the military’s sexual assault acquittal rate:
When a prosecutor does not have good facts, conviction cannot be the expectation. Nor should we want there to be a conviction in many of those cases. That would require a standard below the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, creating an exception in criminal law for sexual assault cases in direct contravention of the Constitution.