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Old 02-08-2017, 01:18 AM   #21
dcarson
 
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

The MI officer wouldn't be there to interrogate her just to make sure that the interrogation didn't violate her rights as a military personnel prisoner and didn't cover stuff that was classified outside the scope of the current investigation. If they learn anything that would fall under the incidental exception for gathering information I'd think.
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Old 02-08-2017, 05:50 AM   #22
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

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Can [Prisoner] Taylor legally be transfered somewhere else, where his care will not be the responsibility of the Fort Leavenworth people?
That would do it. Probably the easiest way to meet your objectives, since you don't really intend to bring him back.

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Can he be remanded into the custody of Military Intelligence? Some other DOD agency?
Permanent custody of an organization without (officially acknowledged) confinement facilities, or transfer to temporary custody without a specific permanent destination, will probably raise questions best left unasked.

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Or can be be declared insane, medically discharged from the Army and subsequently moved to the Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane?
Probably raise questions, too, at this point. The time for this play would have been during the trial.

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Legally, I assume it would be better to have the US Army MI officer accompany Taylor and the two DHS Special Agents with him than to have the DIA officer do so?
If it's really a joint operation it shouldn't matter, but the Army officer may have an easier time negotiating the system.

dcarson is exactly right about the MI officer's role at the interview.
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Old 02-08-2017, 06:26 AM   #23
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

Does the conspiracy own any Judges? They might be able to get the guy out on Bench Warrant
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Old 02-08-2017, 07:38 AM   #24
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

My experience with state prison is that various judges issue bench warrants all the time for offenders, once it is validated, the offender is dressed in court clothes (not a prison uniform), restrained, and two hand picked veteran COs that are well trusted, one of which is armed, take him in a prison van to the court. Technically the court can keep the COs with the offender in which case they will stay with him and keep guarding him, but usually the court will take the offender. Once he is no longer the state prisons offender, the state prison will not be concerned with him very much but will periodically send letters or call to ask what happened and are they getting him back.

Once the court has the offender, he is their problem. He may go into county jail or even be released on bond until they are done with him.
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Old 02-08-2017, 12:57 PM   #25
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

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Does the conspiracy own any Judges? They might be able to get the guy out on Bench Warrant
Well, I haven't really thought about it.

The odds are decent that there were people in the US Attorney's office in the Eastern District of North Carolina who agreed to keep certain information low-key, 'for the good of the nation', back in 2000.

If one of them were a judge now, they might be influenced by someone who knows the full story.
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Old 02-08-2017, 01:38 PM   #26
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

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That would do it. Probably the easiest way to meet your objectives, since you don't really intend to bring him back.

Permanent custody of an organization without (officially acknowledged) confinement facilities, or transfer to temporary custody without a specific permanent destination, will probably raise questions best left unasked.
Can you suggest an organisation or several that would be plausible and I'll check to see if the conspiracy could arrange that?

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Probably raise questions, too, at this point. The time for this play would have been during the trial.
At that point, the data hadn't really been put together and there wasn't an organised faction within the US government that was aware of the unforeseen consequences of Project Jade Serenity. Even if there were, at that time, some few people within the US Army who had an inkling (and knew that illegal experimentation had been carried out), they had no reason to assume that having (then) SFC Mackenzie Chase Taylor rot away in Fort Leavenworth would do any harm to their interests.

There were these two military men suspected or convicted of crimes who orchestrated an escape from the base (outlying part of Camp Mackall, NC) where the Project Jade Serenity experiments were set, but two deserters/escaped prisoners, even violent, murdering ones, seemed like a problem a coterie of conspirational officers within the US Army, DARPA or DOD could solve.

Some of the people who were covering up crimes might have planned to ensure that the deserters remained uncaught (and thus silent) or that whenever the deserters were ultimately caught, they would elect to take a plea bargain that included not airing old dirty laundry about the experiments in return for backing off from the death penalty. Hell, there might have been some people afraid enough of them talking who were considering arranging that when they were caught, they weren't brought in alive.

It was only after evidence began to come to light that the former Project Jade Serenity test subjects were exhibiting profoundly strange medical issues that things began to change. Some time after that information first became clear to a small group of people with access to widely disparate information sources, some people in the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) put together an intelligence picture that made it imperative to mount a task force to capture the escaped military convicts/deserters in Mexico.

The two were by now apparently powerful figures in the drug cartels and were living more or less openly within a certain area near the border. The local authorities seemed thoroughly cowed, subverted or both and the federal police, for some reason, refused to operate in the area. After the FBI, US Marshals, DEA and the CBP and ICE tried and failed to get the Mexican authorities to arrest the two men and several other US citizens allegedly involved in criminal conspiracies in the area, some shadowy figures within high military circles apparently came up with an alternate plan.

Colonel Ortiz, who used to be the commanding officer of Raul Vargas, the former Special Forces warrant officer who was now a high-up in the Knights Templars, was authorised to mount an operation where some of Vargas' former comrades-in-arms would approach him with an offer to squash the more serious crimes he was accused in return for him turning himself in to the task force now established to deal with the fall-out of Project Jade Serenity, which was codenamed Onyx Rain.

Whether Colonel Ortiz received secret orders to kill Vargas if that approach failed is not known to the PCs. What they were told is that the fall-back plan was capture and rendering back to the US, where he would have been turned over to a law enforcement task force composed of Army CID and CBP/ICE. In any event, Col. Ortiz and his hand-picked team of Special Forces never came back from the mission. They were not killed, however, and intelligence indicates that they are still in the area, but not replying to attempts to contact them.

Sherilyn Bell, at the Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane, is Raul Vargas' former girlfriend and the mental health technician who helped him escape from Project Jade Serenity. Onyx Rain believes that she has been in contact with him within the last five years, when Bell managed to get a hold of a cell phone in a security breach at Manhanock. It is possible that Bell may have information that would help to capture Vargas and Onyx Rain is even considering the possibility of using her as an informant or double agent in an operation to do so.

Inmate Taylor was a protegé of Col. Ortiz, coming up as a young Ranger in Ortiz's platoon in the 1st Ranger Battalion and going through a modified form of SFQC with him as part of Project Jade Serenity. He also served with every one of the operators who are AWOL in Mexico. Added to that, other personnel involved in Project Jade Serenity who have been questioned have confirmed that (then) SPC Taylor and (then) Pvt. Bell were close friends during the time they spent at Camp Mackall and that he is the most likely person to be able to gain her trust.

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If it's really a joint operation it shouldn't matter, but the Army officer may have an easier time negotiating the system.
It's a joint operation, but it may not be a joint operation that is duly authorised. Even if it has full authorisation, it is very likely that some of the things that were told to the political figures at the top about the operation and its goals and methods were... substantially edited.
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Old 02-08-2017, 02:54 PM   #27
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

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Can you suggest an organisation or several that would be plausible and I'll check to see if the conspiracy could arrange that?
Looks as if the most likely options are the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), Florence, Colorado, or a so-called Communication Management Unit, both run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, DoJ. These are the facilities where convicted spies who require special handling have been sent. The latter is particularly interesting, in that history suggests that a new CMU might have been established in another prison without that fact necessarily being public knowledge.

Or you could just go with Camp Seven at Guantanamo Bay...
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Old 02-08-2017, 04:13 PM   #28
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Well, I haven't really thought about it.

The odds are decent that there were people in the US Attorney's office in the Eastern District of North Carolina who agreed to keep certain information low-key, 'for the good of the nation', back in 2000.

If one of them were a judge now, they might be influenced by someone who knows the full story.
AFAIK a US Attorney nor a Federal Judge has no jurisdiction on a military prisoner that is in military custody.
The Judge Advocate General's Corps does, though.
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Old 02-08-2017, 06:02 PM   #29
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

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Looks as if the most likely options are the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), Florence, Colorado, or a so-called Communication Management Unit, both run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, DoJ. These are the facilities where convicted spies who require special handling have been sent. The latter is particularly interesting, in that history suggests that a new CMU might have been established in another prison without that fact necessarily being public knowledge.

Or you could just go with Camp Seven at Guantanamo Bay...
Could he be administratively transfered to a CMU, but remain officially under the command responsibility of a Colonel Andrew Burr of the US Army Counterintelligence while the Onyx Rain team visits Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane* (and possible longer, if operationally necessary)?

There were two Army CID agents assigned to the transfer of Inmate Taylor, but given that Manhanock is a highly secure facility with strict rules for who can go there and absolutely no one armed except the tower guards, it would be best if they could wait until the Onyx Rain team is done in there.

A joint task force including US Army Counterintelligence, Army CID and plenty of DHS personnel, including federal law enforcement Special Agents (1811), should have legal competence to take custody of Taylor while he awaits processing into a CMU, right?

And there is no need for the CID agents involved to be cleared for all aspects of operations that fall under Onyx Rain, is there?

*Incidentally, Manhanock appears to be a mental institution equivalent of a CMU.
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Old 02-09-2017, 06:36 AM   #30
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Default Re: Custody of federal prisoners convicted at court martial or unfit for trial

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The MI officer wouldn't be there to interrogate her just to make sure that the interrogation didn't violate her rights as a military personnel prisoner and didn't cover stuff that was classified outside the scope of the current investigation. If they learn anything that would fall under the incidental exception for gathering information I'd think.
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dcarson is exactly right about the MI officer's role at the interview.
Note that it is Mackenzie Chase Taylor who was convicted at court martial and thus remains under Army command as an inmate of the USDB at Fort Leavenworth (and now as he's being transfered into a CMU as a device for getting him under the control of a highly classified joint task force and some very black ops).

Sherilyn Bell was never tried at court martial. Or anywhere, for that matter. A sanity board found her unfit to stand trial in the year 2000, as she was catatonic. A decision was made to defer a general court martial until she was responsive.

We aren't sure what happened next. It seems that the sanity board kept signing off on her being unfit for trial, even when she was no longer catatonic (just delusional, manic-depressive, possibly schizophrenic, borderline personality, etc.). It seems she was just quietly buried in a mental health equivalent to a CMU and never had her day in court. Which my character* does not find even a little bit okay.

I'm assuming that 17 years after her alleged crime and over 18 years after her enlistment, she is no longer under US Army jurisdiction (unless they were to decide to recall her to duty specifically to be able to court martial her).

*I'm not the GM, I'm officially designated the GM's research assistant for worldbuilding plausibility and consistency with the real world (except as he explicitly deviates from it with superpowers and secret supersoldier projects).
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