Akorede Omotayo, The Right to Silence–or the Presumption of Guilt. This is an interesting discussion from another country on something we are familiar with. It will be recalled that the right to silence formerly comprises the privilege against self-incrimination and the right not to have adverse inferences drawn from his…
Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
Article 69(d) in the toolbox
United States v. Roberts, ACCA, May 2020. Click to access sd-roberts,%20dl.pdf Occasionally a TJAG will refer a subjurisdictional sentence case to the CCA, which is what happened here. ACCA looked a two issues: sufficiency of the evidence and post-trial delay. Note, under Article 69(d), UCMJ, the CCA can only review…
Double jeopardy at CAAF
Colonel Rice was arrested for possession and distribution of CP. He was convicted in federal court and at court-martial. That is why we have a CAAF decision in United States v. Rice, __ M.J. ___ (C.A.A.F. May 21, 2020). I think part of the takeaway here is that the Government…
Very significant case for post-trial w/subjurisdictional sentence
You all know that a client gets an automatic appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals when the sentence is for more than one year and/or a punitive discharge. You all know that a case with a subjurisdictional sentence gets a legal review and can be petitioned to TJAG under…
Corroboration is important
John E. Reid & Associates agree that more is needed than a simple “I did it.” The reported interrogations of some of these suspects involved physical coercion, duress and outright torture. While the Supreme Court has consistently prohibited such interrogation practices, evidently the trial courts rejected the defendant’s claim that…
Reid teaches
http://www.reid.com/educational_info/r_tips.html?serial=2019041603&print=%5Bprint%5D Some questions to determine if a statement is voluntary.
Forensics
From Prof. Miller. Thursday, April 30, 2020 Thompson & Casarez on Blind Testing and Forensic Sciences By CrimProf BlogEditor Sandra Guerra Thompson and Nicole B. Casarez (University of Houston Law Center and University of St. Thomas) have posted Solving Daubert’s Dilemma for the Forensic Sciences Through Blind Testing (57 Houston Law Review 617 (2020)) on SSRN.…
A quickie on UMC
United States v. Martin, ACCA April 2020. On appeal, Appellant argued that six separate convictions of Art. 107 were UMC under the circumstances, but Appellant’s UMC claim never gets off the ground. Appellant contends that because the “criminality behind” his Article 107 convictions was not the statements themselves, but rather…
Digital evidence suppressed
United States v. Taylor, NMCCA 30 April 2020 is a government appeal of a judge’s ruling to suppress evidence. [T]he military judge granted a Defense motion to suppress evidence resulting from the searches of 12 of Appellee’s electronic devices. We are asked to decide whether we have jurisdiction over this…
Who needs PC
GA: Arrest for sex offense wasn’t PC to believe digital storage device on person had evidence; SW suppressed Posted on April 30, 2020 by Hall Defendant was arrested for aggravated child molestation and aggravated sodomy, and he had a digital storage device on him. Police sought a search warrant for the storage device,…