Deserter’s fate awaits court

Press, 19 December 1986, Page 6

Deserter’s fate awaits court

NZPA-AP Sydney The Australian Minister of Defence, Kim Beazley, will wait for a High Court decision today before deciding whether an American Vietnam deserter, Douglas Beane, should be sent back to the United States. A High Court judge will hear an application by Beane’s lawyers claiming that the legislation under which he is being held at a Sydney naval base is unconstitutional. Mr Beazley yesterday undertook to Beane’s barrister that he would take no action on an American bid for his extradition until after the court hearing.

Beane was arrested on Monday night at his Brunswick Heads home, where he lived with his Australian wife, Karen, and their two children. He was brought to Sydney on Tuesday.

Civil libertarians claim that the Defence Acts under which Beane is being held classify him as an illegal absentee.

The acts enable Beane to be held without access to lawyers. Newspaper reports from Washington and information from the United States Embassy in Canberra indicated that

Beane, a former Marine private, was facing serious charges when he escaped from United States military detention in Vietnam on February 28, 1970. Sources confirmed press reports that the charges involved currency violations and threatening to kill another soldier.

According to a published interview with his mother in Rutland, Vermont, and a report by a “Canberra Times” journalist, Jack Waterford, Beane escaped from the military’ hospital to which he had been admitted after swallowing wire or nails.

Mr Waterford, who shared a house with him in Canberra in the early 19705, said Beane got to Australia by using a rest-and-recreation pass he found in a stolen uniform.

He built up a new identity and became well known in anti-Vietnam and anti-conscription circles in Sydney and Canberra, according to Mr Waterford. But in the mid-1970s he started drifting, finally to Brunswick Heads.