Professor Friedman has posted the States’ amicus brief in Bullcoming v. New Mexico, along with some rather trenchant dissection of their sky-is-falling and we-are-the-government arguments.
John Galligan bemoans the lack of funding to develop mitigation evidence.
The Hasan Defense Request for Additional Mitigation Funding, dated 7 January 2011, submitted to the Special Court-Martial Convening Authority, still has not been acted upon. By comparison, I am not aware of any funding request by US Army prosecutors that has not been timely and favorably approved . . . . . Why am I not surprised?
No John, why are we not surprised? In that respect United States v. Hasan is no different than other cases.
Federal Computer Week reports:
The Defense Department last year laid out the rules for the military’s use of social media with a set of guidelines that are set to expire on March 1.
Now what? That’s the question that people are asking.
Courtesy of a poster at CAAFLog here is a link to the motion for a new trial and the affidavit given by Dr. Macdonell.
A general lost his joint command because he inappropriately touched female subordinates and made off-colored remarks in private and public meetings, according to the Pentagon’s top investigator. . . . Chambers has declined requests for comment twice, immediately after his dismissal and after Air Force Times obtained the inspector general’s findings Dec. 27 through a Freedom of Information Act request. He is now serving as a special assistant to the commander of the Air Force District of Washington, D.C., while Air Force Secretary Michael Donley reviews his case.
Navy Times reports the Honors “debate.”
In one view, echoed online by thousands of angry supporters, the risqué aspect of Capt. Owen Honors’ videos simply reflected shipboard life and were funny escapes from the often-tedious routine of deployment; offended crew members of the carrier Enterprise could simply look away. Honors was an excellent leader, they say, and became the victim of political correctness gone amok.
Others, including several former commanding officers who spoke with Navy Times, largely disagree. Honors should have realized how far he’d climbed out on a limb, regardless of whether those videos would be viewed outside the ship.
The aim of this study was to model various social and cognitive processes believed to be associated with true and false confessions by exploring the link between investigative biases [1] and what occurs in the interrogation room. Using the Russano et al. (Psychol Sci 16:481–486, 2005) paradigm, this study explored how perceptions of guilt influenced the frequency and type of interrogation tactics used, suspect’s perceptions of the interrogation process, the likelihood of confession, and investigator’s resulting perceptions of culpability. Results suggested that investigator bias led to the increased use of minimization tactics and thereby increased the likelihood of false confessions by innocent participants. In contrast, the manipulation of investigator bias had no direct or indirect influence on guilty participants. These findings confirm the important role of investigator bias and improve our understanding of the decision-making process associated with true and false confessions.
Fadia M. Narchet, Christian A. Meissner and Melissa B. Russano, Modeling the Influence of Investigator Bias on the Elicitation of True and False Confessions, J. Law & Human Behavior (Dec. 2010).
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Do you remember Marine Captain Zander? A distinguished graduate of the Naval Justice School, and having participated in reviewing about 200 of his ROT’s a pretty good trial lawyer viewed against his contemporaries. I posted about his activities in 2009, “I’ve been Zandered! Who remembers that name?” Well he’s back – in court.
Deseret News reports.
A BYU law school graduate who passed himself off as a decorated war veteran and licensed military attorney faces more than two dozen federal charges, including allegedly stealing thousands of dollars from the Paiute Indian Tribe.
The Navy-Marine Corps Trial Judiciary page links to the docket for WESTPAC (which includes Okinawa and Yoko). However, to get the Navy docket at Pearl Harbor you will find it at the Brig website. Interestingly the Navy appears to have tried four cases since 29 November, and one of those appears to have been a two-day Article 86 summary court-martial, and one was a Coastie.
I don’t know that we’ve had this issue come up in military cases, but there’s a first time for everything. Plus this case highlights potentially confusing “tests” that arise from different courts.
During oral argument in Kentucky v. King on Wednesday, the Court struggled to find the proper test for determining when police are prohibited from justifying a warrantless search with exigent circumstances that they create. Because neither side supported the Kentucky Supreme Court’s two-prong test, a straightforward affirmance seems very unlikely; instead, the Court focused on whether the state’s proposed “lawfulness” test or another of the five tests currently being used by lower courts is best.
H/T to SCOTUSBlog.
Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
