NORFOLK A military jury sentenced a Navy senior chief petty officer accused of abusing subordinates to 179 days of confinement and reduction in rate to petty officer 3rd class after finding him guilty of six charges in a general court-martial Friday.
Senior Chief Petty Officer Kevin M. Curtis had faced a maximum punishment of seven years' confinement and a bad conduct discharge. The jury found him not guilty of dozens more charges that could have put him behind bars for more than 50 years.
Curtis, formerly the head of the security department aboard the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, was convicted of fraternization, disrespecting a superior officer and cruelty toward and maltreatment of four sailors who worked for him as first- and second-class petty officers.
The jury found him not guilty of the most serious charge, aggravated assault, in which he was accused of choking a sailor with an elastic exercise band. Nor was he convicted of 15 counts of assault stemming from allegations he stapled sailors' skin, sprayed them with pepper spray, threw them into walls and illegally handcuffed them. Curtis had vehemently denied those allegations.
Prosecutors had argued that Curtis' failures began at the administrative level, when he didn't complete and send routine leave requests, qualification forms and advancement packages. They went much deeper, prosecutors said, to include telling sailors to lie to the chain of command, engaging in violent horseplay and scaring them into submission to ensure they didn't report his mistreatment.
Curtis, a 17-year Navy veteran, acknowledged it was wrong to regularly engage in horseplay with the younger masters-at-arms assigned to his department. But the wrestling and grappling was mutual and consensual, he said, and would stop if they asked or indicated they were in pain.
Rick Morris, Curtis' defense attorney, argued that three of the four sailors who accused him of assault had axes to grind against their former boss.
Curtis was found guilty of disrespecting the officer who was his immediate superior by describing him with expletives and referring to him as an idiot in front of junior sailors.
The fraternization conviction involved Curtis asking a subordinate to loan him $1,000. He later repaid part of it and was ordered to return the rest of the money after one of his bosses learned about the loan. Navy regulations forbid sailors of different ranks from "unduly familiar" contact, which includes borrowing or lending money.
