Articles Posted in Uncategorized

I mentioned an article yesterday about the court-martial of a New Zealand army officer.  I wondered if you’d noticed the same thing.

What’s the officers name?

The question relates to how other countries deal with trial by media.

Justice Souter’s nomination, although apparently predictable, is in the news.  Here is an interesting perspective on how his retirement and Senator Specter’s “defection” may impact the nominee to replace Justice Souter and all of the administrations future judicial nominations.

Prof. Michael C. Dorf, How Specter’s Defection Could Make it Harder to Confirm Pres. Obama’s Judicial Nominations, Dorf on Law, 28 April 2009.

Here is a piece on Kevin from the 28 April 2009, Washington Post.

The Kansas Court of Appeals continues the tradition of citation to anecdotal legal authority.  See The cult of Sir Cloudesly Shovell, CAAFLog, 21 April 2009.

It appears that the Kansas Court of Appeals cited the little watched short running show “Branded” as a basis to overturn a trial judges requirement that a convicted child abuser put notices on his lawn of his conviction.

ABA News, 24 April 2009.

Here is an interesting, very fact specific, federal case in which the forensic examination of a computer for child pornography was suppressed.  The accused had admitted possessing child pornography, showed the police his computer, but refused a search of it.  The police took the computer.  Then it sat around for about three weeks before the police got a search warrant.  The court does caution the case to be fact specific.

United States v. Mitchell, __ F.3d ___ (11th Cir. 2009).

Here is an article brought to our attention by FourthAmendment.com.

A thoughtful article about the Supreme Court’s "seizure" doctrine, so much a part of the all encompassing reasonable suspicion standard, by David K. Kessler is Free to Leave? An Empirical Look at the Fourth Amendment’s Seizure Standard, 99 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 51 (2009).

Whether a person has been “seized” often determines if he or she receives Fourth Amendment protection. The U.S. Supreme Court has established a standard for identifying seizures: a person is seized when a reasonable person in his situation would not have felt “free to leave” or otherwise to terminate the encounter with law enforcement. In applying that standard, today’s courts conduct crucial seizure inquiries relying only upon their own beliefs about when a reasonable person would feel free to leave. But both the Court and scholars have noted that although empirical evidence about whether people actually feel free to leave would help guide the seizure inquiry, no such evidence presently exists. This Article presents the first empirical study of whether people would actually feel free to leave in two situations in which the Court has held that people would: on public sidewalks and on buses. Drawing on a survey of 406 randomly selected Boston residents, this Article concludes that people would not feel free to end their encounters with the police. Under the Court’s current standard, respondents would be seized within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment in both scenarios. The data also show that knowledge of one’s legal right to end the encounter with the police would not make people feel free to leave, and that women and people under twenty-five would feel less free to leave than would men and people over twenty-five. This initial empirical evidence suggests the need to rethink the current seizure standard.

With the increasing release of information regarding the who, what, when, where, of torture approvals comes the need to relook at the court-martial convictions of the low level military personnel who executed the policy.  A policy that at the time of the trials was denied, hushed up, or ignored.  We don’t have to excuse them, but the junior military personnel once again came up on the sort end of the stick.

So, Daniel Nasaw, Report vindicates soldiers prosecuted over Abu Ghraib abuses, lawyers say.  The Guardian, 22 April 2009.

Often times the “foreign papers are more accurate, timely, and detailed.”  They have yet to be coerced or lured into blatting [n.1] the government agenda.

A Naval Academy midshipman is scheduled to be court-martialed Tuesday at the Navy Yard in Washington on theft and related charges, the school announced Friday. Midshipman 1st Class Julia Kaelberer, of Rialto, Calif., has accepted a plea agreement and will face charges of theft, unlawful entry, making false official statements and conduct unbecoming an officer, according to Judy Campbell, a spokeswoman for the Naval Academy. The academy did not release further details about the case.

Baltimore Sun, 25 April 2009.

I found this unusual.  You don’t normally here of this type of crime coming out of any of the service academies.

The US Marine acquitted on appeal in a high-profile rape case has left the Philippines, but he could face court martial in the US, officials said.

"Following the decision of the Philippine Court of Appeals, Daniel Smith departed the Philippines under the authority of United States military officials," the US embassy said in a statement.

Calling the rape case "long and difficult," the US embassy said Smith was detained for more than three years in its premises in compliance with the Visiting Forces Agreement, which governs the conduct of US troops in the Philippines.

Prof. Colin Miller, Coming Out of the Closet: How Arizona v. Gant Could Lead to the Shrinking of the Scope of Searches Incident to Lawful Home Arrests, 24 April 2009.