You are confined, your case is appealed, your case is reversed and a new trial ordered. You will stay in confinement–pretrial confinement. But what about all the pay you lost while confined. This happened to Garcia, and after retrial he’d served two years of what became a two month sentence.…
Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
Change in the offing-again
Practitioners of military justice have been dealing with change over the last years due primarily to different approaches to sexual assault cases. Friend and colleague Cully Stimson has a published piece from his and his organization’s perspective. Take a look. The 2015 Report of the Military Justice Review Group: Reasonable…
All too common, and potentially applicable to military investigators
The Guardian reports, Detective criticised for ‘getting too close’ in alleged rape case, 9 May 2016. A senior judge has criticised a police detective and the Crown Prosecution Service for their handling of an accusation of gang rape after the case against four young men collapsed just as their trial was…
Why worry what’s on your phone
“Washington’s Supreme Court has thrown out the convictions of three men in what police called a gang-related shooting, finding among other things that music on one defendant’s phone was not evidence of gang ties.” That’s the headline from the Seattle Times. The slip opinion in State (Washington) v. Deleon is…
Fraternization and GoD
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…
Its a question of reliability
· 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…
Getting the expert is just part of the process
Working with expert witnesses can be difficult for even the most seasoned attorneys and trial consultants. Oftentimes, egos and expertise can get in the way of an expert’s ability to deliver persuasive testimony, requiring attorneys and trial consultants to be creative when developing solutions that fit both the problem and…
By the numbers
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…
Worth the Read
Adam M. Gershowitz, The Post-Riley Search Warrant: Search Protocols and Particularity in Cell Phone Searches, 69 Vand. L. Rev. 585 (2016) Margaret Dodson, Bruton on Balance: Standardizing Redacted Codefendant Confessions Through Federal Rule of Evidence 403, 69 Vand. L. Rev. 803 (2016)
Clemency from the Prez.
This week, the Combat Clemency Project at the University of Chicago Law School petitioned for a Presidential Pardon on behalf of Corey R. Clagett, a former Army PFC released on March 31, 2016 from the US military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas after a decade of incarceration. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/review-combat-clemency-petitions-and-pursue-military-mental-health-reform