THE ARMED FORCES: The Girard Case (Contd.)

Restricted to Camp Whittington, 60 miles from Tokyo, slim, pompadoured Army Specialist Third Class William S. Girard, 21, parried newsmen with newly polished “no comments,” posed for pictures with his fiancée, Haru (“Candy”) Sueyama, 27, kept in touch with his lawyers on both sides of the Pacific. As one of his ex-buddies put it, Girard was “learning to walk like a hero” in the growing light of worldwide publicity.

The light flared even brighter last week when in Washington a federal judge undertook to decide whether Girard should be tried by a U.S. or a Japanese court for the fatal shooting of a Japanese woman scrounging metal on an Army firing range (TIME. June 17). He was not attempting to pass on Girard’s guilt or innocence, said District Judge Joseph C. McGarraghy. Nor was he assessing the relative merits of U.S. and Japanese justice. But since the Army admits that Girard was on duty when he fired the shot, the U.S. was in error when it waived its primary jurisdiction to the Japanese under the status-of-forces agreement. Turning Girard over to Japanese courts would be “in violation of the Constitution” (i.e., the right to a U.S. court-martial), and Judge McGarraghy ordered the Department of Defense not to surrender him.

Contending that U.S. prestige in Japan and agreements covering some 49 friendly nations were at stake, Government lawyers, backed by an affidavit from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, quickly appealed to the Supreme Court what they called McGarraghy’s “clearly wrong” injunction, bypassing the Appellate Court on grounds that the Girard case’s “imperative public importance” demanded a speedy settlement. Their two-fold argument: 1) the Uniform Code of Military Justice permits the Pentagon to surrender jurisdiction to civil authority where it sees fit; 2) in international relations, i.e., the status-of-forces agreement with Japan, the U.S. executive branch has power to waive jurisdiction over overseas G.I.s. At week’s end the U.S. Supreme Court decided to delay adjournment (originally slated for this week), extend its term to hear the Girard case early next month.