Girl, 16, denied British jury trial by US military

Five complainants, aged 16 to 24, described repeated indecent exposure. One recalled him standing with his shorts down, phone held out, hand on his penis. Another described him posing naked in a doorway. One of the women said she no longer felt safe in her own town.

Cambridgeshire Police arrested Marschalek on 9 October 2022. Three weeks later, on 31 October, they handed the investigation to the US military, after a request from US authorities. Under English law he faced up to two years in prison. Instead, a US military court-martial in 2023 saw one charge dropped in a plea bargain and a reference to masturbation stripped from the charge that remained. He was sentenced to two months in a Lakenheath correctional facility and dismissed from the service. In April 2026, a US military appeal court quashed even that conviction, ruling the wrong offence had been charged. Prosecutors are challenging the ruling. Marschalek is back in the United States, listed on the Oklahoma sex offender registry.

The Sofa Agreement: how US military justice reached ahead of British courts

Marschalek’s case is not an isolated malfunction. On 26 June 2026 the Guardian revealed that Capt Jacob Wulfson, a Lakenheath fighter pilot, had been tried by an all-male panel of eight US Air Force officers, not a British jury, for strangling Cambridge academic Sarah Steele. Cambridgeshire Police never referred that case to the Crown Prosecution Service either. Wulfson was convicted of non-fatal strangulation and acquitted of sexual assault, sentenced to six months in a base facility and dismissed.

Steele has said the process was “distressing and degrading”, conducted “incredibly aggressively” by the defence, and at times felt “surreal, akin to being part of an absurd Netflix series”. Proceedings were interrupted by fighter-jet noise. She was given no screen or video link and shared space with the man who strangled her. “No member of the British constabulary ever asked me what I wanted,” she has said, describing pockets of American jurisdiction operating inside British territory.

The legal mechanism behind both cases is the NATO Status of Forces Agreement, incorporated into UK law by the Visiting Forces Act 1952. For off-duty, off-base crimes against British civilians, the UK holds the primary right of jurisdiction. Article VII(3)(c) obliges the country with that primary right only to give “sympathetic consideration” to a US request to take a case instead, an obligation to consider a waiver, not to grant one. Cambridgeshire Police could have said no. Twice, they said yes.

Twelve thousand troops, no published record

Britain currently hosts around 12,000 US military personnel, including a permanent deployment of 9,730 US Air Force staff, the third-largest USAF presence anywhere in the world, spread across at least 24 sites worth an estimated £11bn. What Britain does not have is any published record of how often police forces refuse or grant US requests to take jurisdiction over crimes against British civilians. Two cases from the same base, in the same three years, are what has surfaced. Nobody in government can currently say whether that is typical or exceptional, because nobody counts it.

Cambridgeshire Police say they took statements and that “all victims were consulted” in the Wulfson case, and that no one complained about the decision at the time. Steele directly disputes this and says she was never asked. That contradiction has not been resolved, and this piece does not resolve it. It records that a British police force and the woman it was meant to be protecting cannot agree on whether she was ever consulted before her case left British jurisdiction.

David Lammy, the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, has said he wants the US to “give a full account” and that officials are “working across government to establish the full facts”. Downing Street called the Wulfson case “deeply distressing” and said it was “very concerning” it never reached the CPS. Jess Phillips has said: “No UK victim should be handed over to the US military for a crime committed on UK soil unless that is exactly what they want to happen.” Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP for West Suffolk, where Lakenheath sits, has written to Lammy demanding to know “who decided to relinquish UK jurisdiction”, arguing the case “should have been fully investigated by the English police and prosecuted in our courts, with the defendant tried by a jury and the sentence determined by a judge”.

The treaty didn’t do this, a police force did, and that is the point

The obvious objection is that none of this is the SOFA’s fault. The treaty gives Britain the primary right; Cambridgeshire Police chose to waive it. Blaming a basing arrangement for a local operational decision lets the actual decision-makers off the hook.

That is true, and it is also not the whole answer. A treaty that requires only “sympathetic consideration”, attached to a base worth £11bn and an ally Britain has no wish to embarrass, is precisely the kind of structural pressure that makes a local force fold twice in three years without anyone having to order it to. The Sofa Agreement did not strip Cambridgeshire Police of its power. It built the conditions in which giving that power away looked like the easier, friendlier choice. Both facts belong in the same sentence.

What is not in dispute is the substance of Marschalek’s own texts, or the outcome each woman was left with: a plea bargain instead of a trial, an eventual conviction with the most serious element already removed, and then even that conviction quashed. Whatever a US military appeal court decides next, the girl who was 16 in Littleport in 2022 has still never had a British jury hear her account, on British soil, under British law.