PASSINGS
Joseph Baum, 78, who spent more than 20 years as chief judge of the Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals, died of congestive heart failure April 25 at a hospital in Annapolis, Md.
The seven-member appeals court reviews legal cases, courts-martial and a variety of other matters for the Coast Guard. It is the only military service court with civilian members, and during his tenure Baum, a retired Navy captain, was the sole civilian chief judge of a U.S. military court.
After becoming chief judge in 1985, he participated in more than 250 decisions and wrote the majority opinion in two-thirds of them.
His most notable case, Solorio vs. the United States, reached the Supreme Court in 1987. In that case, a Coast Guardsman was charged with child molestation in his private home in Alaska. He challenged the right of the military court to bring charges against him, saying it had no jurisdiction over actions committed on private property and not related to his official duty.
The high court upheld Baum’s decision that the Coast Guard had the authority to try the Guardsman, saying that “military jurisdiction has always been based on the ‘status’ of the accused, rather than on the nature of the offense.”
Joseph Herbert Baum was born in Memphis and was a graduate of the University of Chicago. After graduating from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1955, he joined the Navy.
As a legal officer of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, he served as either prosecutor or defense counsel in many courts-martial. He was chief of the Navy’s Military Justice Division and was a judge for six years on the Navy’s old Court of Military Review, the forerunner of the Court of Criminal Appeals.
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