Judge Was on Military Court

Joseph H. Baum, 78, a retired Navy captain who was a high-ranking legal officer in the Navy before spending more than 20 years as chief judge of the Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals, died April 25 of congestive heart failure at Anne Arundel Medical Center. He lived in Arnold.

The appeals court contains seven members and 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 Judge Baum 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 v. 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 Judge 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. He was a legal officer aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and participated in the Cuban blockade of 1962.

He was stationed in Japan from 1965 to 1969 before coming to the Washington area. 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.

During his Navy career, Judge Baum conducted several investigations into naval accidents, sinkings and fires, including the shooting down of a Navy reconnaissance plane over North Korea in 1969.

He was the defense attorney for the commanding officer of the USS Belknap, a guided missile cruiser that collided with the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy near Italy in 1975, killing eight people and injuring 47. Judge Baum won an acquittal for the commanding officer, who was not on duty at the time of the accident. He established that the lower-ranking "officer on deck" had de facto command of the vessel and that the captain could not be held culpable simply by virtue of his rank.

Judge Baum was a longtime member of the Federal Bar Association and chaired its Military Justice Committee and its Judiciary Division. In 2006, he won the organization's Justice Tom C. Clark Award for outstanding work by a government lawyer. He retired in 2007.

He lived in the King's Park West community of Fairfax County for many years before moving to Arnold two years ago.

His wife of 22 years, Hope Malcolm Baum, died in 1985.

Survivors include his longtime companion, the psychologist, author and television personality Dr. Joyce Brothers of Fort Lee, N.J.; a son from his marriage, Daniel B. Baum of Arnold; three stepchildren, Eric C. Helfers of Glenn Dale, and Patricia H. Buckley and Mary Elizabeth Gantt, both of Atlanta; a sister; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.