The Army legal websites are back en clair, having been unavailable to the public for about five to six weeks. Of course, they came back up just as the AFCCA and CAAF were going dark. Anyway. United States v. Commisso, No. 20140205 (A. Ct. Crim. App. 29 April 2016), has…
· Police can tell when a suspect is lying · People confess only when they have actually committed the crime they are being charged with · Most judges and jurors fully understand court instructions · Eye-witnesses are always the most reliable source of case-related information · Most mentally ill individuals…
DoD has published the Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military for 2015. Of the 6,083 initial complaints filed last year, about 1,500 were “restricted,” meaning the victim was a service member who reported the assault but refused to participate in any criminal investigation and only…
The interesting case of West v. Rieth, et. al. has come across the transom and it’s worth the read. West alleges that the Federal Defendants, who with one exception were also U.S. Marine Corps service members at all relevant times, conspired to lodge false complaints and accusations of sexual harassment and sexual…
I have used the title of a new paper by Prof. Richard Leo. Of the 1,705 post-conviction DNA and non-DNA exonerations that have occurred from 1989 to the end of 2015, approximately 13 percent of these wrongful convictions were due to false confessions, and virtually all of these occurred in…
We are all familiar of Congressional and command efforts to address military sexual assaults. Many of the revisions to the UCMJ and the MCM flowing from these efforts are appropriate, reasonable, or meaningless. However, what does appear consistent is the failure of Congress to recognize that it has a concomitant…
“[I]t is relatively straightforward for an innocent person’s DNA to be inadvertently transferred to surfaces that he or she has never come into contact with. This could place people at crime scenes that they had never visited or link them to weapons they had never handled.” In discussing United States…
Because of the current politics surrounding sexual assaults in the military, some are wondering what they can do in advance to avoid a later false claim of sexual assault. This has lead to a suggestion that the interactions should be video recorded, the idea being that the recording will later…
Naval Academy Professor Sues Navy Over Free Speech This reports Military.com: A civilian professor at the U.S. Naval Academy is suing the Navy, accusing it of violating his First Amendment right to free speech and chilling academic freedom. Attorneys for Bruce Fleming said Thursday that the professor was denied…
We do a lot of military sexual assault cases with alcohol involved. It is not unusual for a complaining witness to claim they were drunk, blacked out and didn’t consent. First, if blacked out they can’t know they didn’t consent–it’s impossible if they were blacked out, rather than them exhibiting a…