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January 13

What happens if a military dependent is charged in civilian court off-base?

So imagine the following (entirely fictional) scenario: a military servicemember's wife works at an off-base public school as a cheer coach, and they decide to adopt twin girls who go to the school which employs the service member's wife and are removed from their biological parents due to abuse (therefore making the twins military dependents). One of the twins (who is one of the wife's cheerleaders) is incarcerated in a juvenile detention center with serious pending charges at the time of the adoption. Lets pretend that this is in the state of Florida and the servicemember is either in the Navy stationed at NAS Key West or in the Air Force stationed at MacDill Air Force Base. Assuming that it's realistic for them to even be able to adopt the twins, what happens if the girl with legal trouble is placed on juvenile probation and then the service member gets PCS orders to an overseas base? Would the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice turn the girl's supervision over to the military? Could DJJ force the girl to be placed in a group home (or worse, a DJJ residential program)? This question is for a fictional story I am writing, not legal advice for any real situation; the base in the story is a fictional installation in the Fort Myers area, and I'm curious what would actually happen in this kind of situation. 71.215.69.126 (talk) 07:03, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

While it's possible that someone with appropriate legal expertise (and interest) might still answer, I suspect this falls into the category of things that (a) have never previously happened and (b) no-one would go to the possibly great effort of trying to answer unless it actually did.

Human laws, regulations, procedures and customs are inevitably not a completely coherent single system, and have a large (possibly infinite?) number of potential contradictory or unresolvable situations. (There's probably a technical term for this.) When unprecedented situations with no obvious resolution arise, they are often addressed either hastily and unsatisfactorily (and then expensively re-addressed later), or by analysing the situation more thoroughly and/or creating additional laws (etc.) or amending the existing ones that do not cover the new situation. It is difficult-to-impossible to predict in advance how this will be done.

Now perhaps someone else will respond to show how I'm wrong, and in doing so will come up with the answer you're looking for. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.194.245.235 (talk) 13:23, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

While this specific scenario is fictional, the parents of a juvenile delinquent needing to relocate due to various circumstances is common enough that solutions have been found for similar real-life scenarios. One conceivable (at least to me) solution is that someone employed at the overseas base is appointed as the parole officer of the juvenile delinquent. --Lambiam 00:33, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Defector

Why are people who escape from North Korea referred to as "North Korean defectors" instead of "emigrants" or "refugees"? "Defector" seems to suggest that they had some obligation to stay in North Korea, but I don't here that word used for people who leave other countries. 2601:640:4000:3170:0:0:0:614B (talk) 08:50, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Um, I think you'll find that people living in North Korea do indeed have an obligation to stay there. --Viennese Waltz 08:57, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The North Korean government has on numerous occasions used armed force to prevent its citizens leaving. AndyTheGrump (talk) 09:02, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the North Korean government wants them to stay there, under penalty of torturing their family or something, but why do people from other countries act like they have an obligation to stay there? Isn't that what calling them "defectors" implies? I haven't heard people refer to the emigrants escaping the brutal regime in Afghanistan as "defectors". What's special about North Korea that the government's opinion is considered inherently valid? 2601:640:4000:3170:0:0:0:614B (talk) 09:07, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The article on the Berlin Wall calls people fleeing from East Germany to West Germany "defectors" (whereas the German article calls them Flüchtende, "refugees" or maybe better "someone who escapes"). The term "emigrant" would have been somewhat out of place because West Germany did not (or tried to avoid the impression that it did) recognize East Germany as a separate country. I do not know to what extent that is transferable to the Korean situation. I'm sure, however, that the use of the word "defector" is not meant to be judgmental. --Wrongfilter (talk) 10:13, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The term doesn't imply an obligation. It means the country they are leaving goes to extreme lengths to try to prevent such a thing, up to and including killing, e.g. the aforementioned Berlin Wall or the Korean Demilitarized Zone. On the other hand, Americans going to Canada to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War were labeled "draft evaders" or "draft dodgers", not defectors. Clarityfiend (talk) 11:43, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you get killed for trying to leave, I would say that is clearly an obligation to stay. When a government uses the threat of death, pain, or imprisonment to coerce its citizens to do something, that something is clearly an obligation. --Jayron 32 13:30, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Surely OP is referring to a moral obligation, not a factual one imposed through brute force. --Wrongfilter (talk) 14:17, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how you read it that way, since they literally didn't say that. They said "obligation", and did not qualify it. --Jayron 32 14:19, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. --Wrongfilter (talk) 14:25, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To whom is the putative defector supposed to be obliged (or not)? Does a principled pacifist who considers themself a global citizen have the obligation, when called for duty, to join the army of the belligerent country that considers them its subject? And when arrested and forced into duty, do they have an obligation to fight and kill "the enemy"? The judges of the court-martial will probably say yes, but it is hard to maintain (IMO) that this was a moral obligation. If the conscript manages to walk over to the other side of the battlefield without getting killed, the common terminology is, nevertheless, that they defected. --Lambiam 14:54, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Just to be (unnecessarily?) clear: I do not think that the word "defector" implies that there is a moral obligation. I'm just saying that OP seems to think it does or at least has such a connotation. (I don't think they're referring to a legal or otherwise enforced obligation because that would be trivial for anyone who knows a wee bit about N Korea) --Wrongfilter (talk) 15:50, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Where did you read that connotation in the OP's post? Can you point to the words they used that led you to that connotation, so I can understand it that way too? --Jayron 32 16:46, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It is a conclusion from the assumption that the OP is aware of the fact that North Korean citizens have a legal obligation not to leave their country without permission – which will normally not be granted – or, if granted, have the legal obligation to return. Combine this with the OP's wording of "Defector" seems to suggest that they had some obligation to stay in North Korea." This phrase implies that in the mind of the OP, for some sense of the term "obligation", the escapees had no obligation to stay in or return to North Korea. One is allowed to conclude that this sense is not that of a legal obligation. --Lambiam 00:54, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say its the phrasing from their second post "Yes, the North Korean government wants them to stay there, under penalty of torturing their family or something, but why do people from other countries act like they have an obligation to stay there?". This seems to be arguing that the use of "defector" implies an obligation beyond that legally imposed by the laws of NK. I.e. that when we describe someone as a defector we're not just saying "NK doesn't want you to leave", but also "therefore you shouldn't have left". Iapetus (talk) 11:20, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Can't log onto OED right now but per Wiktionary definition, yes three of the four definitions have an obligation connotation: 1. (intransitive) To abandon or turn against; to cease or change one's loyalty, especially from a military organisation or political party. 2. (military) To desert one's army, to flee from combat. 3. (military) To join the enemy army. 4. (law) To flee one's country and seek asylum. However, it seems everyone here is talking about definition 4 which does not have this connotation. You are right that we don't talk about defectors from Somalia or Syria, for example, so I do think it's a holdover from Cold War language, with the connotation that there will never be any going back. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 16:19, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The definition in OED is "A person who defects from a person, party, organization, or cause; (in later use) spec. one who abandons a communist country in order to settle in a non-communist country, or vice versa." It seems entirely appropriate to use it in this sense for North Koreans, as I seem to recall it used to be used for East Germans, Poles, and the like. DuncanHill (talk) 16:50, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And Soviet citizens, such as Rudolf Nureyev. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:07, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Lee Harvey Oswald is commonly called an American defector to the Soviet Union. We have a caregory, Category:American defectors to the Soviet Union with 18 articles. Cullen328 (talk) 21:24, 13 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Most of those 18 characters were spies. The ones who were fugitives from justice could be said to have "defected". The others (including Oswald) simply moved to the USSR, and some of them (including Oswald) changed their minds and moved back. No big deal. Someone not a fugitive from justics is not a "defector", that's just political propaganda. Any ordinary American citizen is free to leave America at any time. "Defecting" to an old-style communist country is like trying to break into a prison. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:31, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You are free, of course, Baseball Bugs, to redefine words as you see fit for your own personal parlance. But the fact of the matter is that Oswald and others like him were called "defectors" at that time and up until the present. Oswald was repeatedly described as a defector long before he killed JFK. Cullen328 (talk) 09:11, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How often do "defectors" return to their homelands without any kind of legal consequences? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:55, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And was Oswald that much in the public eye before shooting JFK? I read about him, but can't remember. In the 1930s there were a lot of finnish- russian workers (I guess from Karelia) in the USA, who returned to the Soviet Union in the Great Depression. Their passports and their money were taken by the Stalinist regime, they went to the US embassy for help, but were denied (you made your bed, etc.). So the SU probl. saw them as defectors and the US embassy as communist anti-americans, probl. a bit as defectors from the USA too.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 06:58, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]