Court-Martial Trial Practice BlogAndrew Gilmore, Mexico publishes law establishing database of mobile phone users, Paper Chase, JURIST, 10 February 2009.
Articles Posted in Uncategorized
Child pornography — again
CAAFLog has noted that NMCCA has scheduled oral argument in United States v. Craig, No. NMCCA 200800716
The two issues are:
I. WHETHER THE APPELLANT’S GUILTY PLEA TO DISTRIBUTION OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY WAS IMPROVIDENT, AS THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE THAT APPELLANT DELIVERED ANY UNLAWFUL IMAGES TO ANYONE?
A.F.C.C.A.
The Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals updated their opinions today. Several may have value for discussion, more later.
Metadata and emails.
Earlier I posted an item on how to interpret email headers.
Here is an interesting article about the email headers — metadata.
Tresa Baldas, Metadata Grows in Legal Import, The National L. J., 26 January 2009.
Rights Advice
It occurs to me that most suspects interrogated by NCIS, CID, OSI, CGIS, have never seen the "rights' form they have you sign. So if you've not seen it in advance, it's harder to know what it is and how to complete it.
Here is an example, and it is pretty uniform across the Services although the example is Army.
Read it now, see where the check marks are, and exercise those rights.
Reservists on a court-martial panel?
As a result of the current National Guard and Reserve activations I, like many of my colleagues, find ourselves representing Guard or Reserve clients at court-martial. From time to time they ask if they can have Guard or Reservists on their Members Panel (jury). The answer is no they can't require Guard or Reserve panel members, unlike in administrative discharge boards.
Here though is an interesting challenge to the Canadian system of Panel Member selection.
CBC News, Lawyer challenges jury selection at N.S. soldier's court martial, 6 February 2009.
Legally thinking
Professor Solum is getting some play in the legal blogs over the last day or so. Professor Solum explains the interpretation-construction distinction, in 8 February 2009, Legal Theory Lexicon: Interpretation and Construction, post.
We can roughly define these two activities as follows:
* Interpretation: The activity of determining the linguistic meaning (or semantic content) of a legal text.
Another Suspect
The Blog of Legal Times, 6 February 2009, has this entry:
A seventh suspect was arrested and charged today for the murder of
Juwan Johnson, the U.S. Army sergeant who was beaten to death by other
Post-conviction access to DNA evidence
Lisa Demer, High court to hear Alaska man's DNA appeal, Anchorage Daily News, 7 February 2009.
Osborne was born and raised in South Carolina, graduated high school
there. He said he was accepted into The Citadel but it was too
Chances on appeal?
Not good? Is that the bottom line coming out of appellate results proffered by CAAFLog, Appellate Relief Data (8 February 2009)?
CAAFLog's own "research" of Air Force opinions yields an approximate 4.7% chance of getting relief, and an undetermined chance of meaningful relief within that number of cases.
CAAFLog also points to Major Jeffrey D. Lippert, Automatic Appeal Under UCMJ Article 66: Time for a Change, 182 MIL. L. REV. 1, 17 (2004).