Ex-Sergeant Sentenced on Sex Counts

After a former drill sergeant at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground burst into tears, pounded his head on a table and pleaded for leniency Friday, a court-martial jury sentenced him to six months in prison for 18 counts of sexual misconduct with five female trainees and for interfering with the investigation.

Staff Sgt. Vernell Robinson Jr., the first Aberdeen defendant to admit taking part in a “game” of sexual conquest with other drill instructors, also will be given a dishonorable discharge. He has served in the military 12 years.

Robinson, who will be eligible for parole in two months, could have been incarcerated for 55 years.

The seven-member court-martial panel handed down its sentence after Robinson broke down during a dramatic apology.

“I got out of my character,” he told the panel. “I lost the ground I was standing on. . . . I got the devil in me!” He cried and banged his head on the defense table as he begged permission to remain in the Army.

Experts in military justice called Robinson’s sentence a light one considering the number of counts against him and the seriousness with which the Army views sexual-misconduct infractions by drill sergeants.

“It does seem on the light side,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington lawyer with long experience in the field of military justice. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of at least 10 years.

During his three-day trial, Robinson told how he and other sergeants identified female recruits as sexual targets when they arrived at Aberdeen and maneuvered to have sex with them, all the while covering up for other drill instructors. They called their sport “the game” and Robinson acknowledged that he had considered himself a “gangster” beyond the reach of his superiors.

But Robinson, like the three others charged in the military’s biggest sex scandal, insisted that the sex was consensual. The single charge of rape lodged against him was dropped before the trial.

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Four men at Aberdeen were originally charged with rape, but the charges were dropped against all but Delmar Simpson, who was sentenced to a maximum 25 years in prison for raping six women.

Some critics have said that the scaling down of those charges calls into question the Army’s seriousness in handling the cases. But Army officials have insisted that the thoroughness of the investigation proves the service’s determination to allow “zero tolerance” for sexual misconduct.

Yet to be seen is how seriously the Army views the failings of the officers who were charged with overseeing the two battalions where the misconduct occurred.

After Simpson’s sentencing last month, one top officer at the Aberdeen Ordnance Center and School deflected blame from the officers, saying that the Aberdeen scandal was the product of military budget cutbacks and insufficient screening of drill instructors. More senior Army officials have remained largely mum on the issue of officers’ responsibility.

But by mid-June, the Army is to make public a report by a high-level task force on the causes of the scandal and appropriate remedies. The Army inspector general’s office is to issue a separate report about the same time.

The two reports will put the Army leaders in a ticklish position. While they do not want to be accused of disloyalty to their officers, neither can they afford to be seen as covering up wrongdoing, as some critics perceived the Navy to have done in the Tailhook sexual-harassment scandal in 1991.