Federal Evidence Review now has their annual retro and prospective reviews of noteworthy evidence issues for 2010 and 2011 online.
Key Evidence Issues During 2010
1. Supreme Court Watch: Briscoe v. Virginia – Confrontation Clause – No New Guidance On Forensic Laboratory Analysis
To stay out of trouble.
To work hard for you clients.
Labor Department employment statistics released Friday show that young veterans continue to have serious and growing problems finding work in a tight job market, while older veterans are doing better than the general population.
Good luck to any court-martialed sailor or Marine who is found guilty of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice and tries to appeal.
Luck is indeed what they may need, given the shortcomings of the appeals process cited by the Defense Department Inspector General.
The IG released a damning report in December, slamming the Navy and Marine Corps for “at least two decades” of serious deficiencies in handling appeals of general and special courts-martial convictions.
Military.com reports:
An Army appeals court on Friday declined to order that gruesome Afghan corpse photographs taken by Washington state-based soldiers be made public.
Pfc. Andrew Holmes, of Boise, Idaho, is one of five soldiers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord charged in the deaths of three civilians in Kandahar Province last year. He filed a petition asking the Army Court of Criminal Appeals to allow him to present the sensitive photographs during a preliminary hearing in his case.
The newly revised UCMJ is here. Thanks to CAAFLog.
You may be familiar with the quote:
In every case involving [state your poison], we are confronted with relativity and the degree to which such conduct may have affected the substantial rights of the defendant. It is better to follow the rules than to try to undo what has been done. Otherwise stated, one ‘Cannot unring a bell’; ‘after the thrust of the saber it is difficult to say forget the wound’; and finally, ‘if you throw a skunk into the jury box, you can’t instruct the jury not to smell it’. Dunn v. United States, 307 F.2d 883, 886 (5th Cir. 1962)(emphasis added).
And you may be familiar with this research.
United States v. Stefan is a 5-0 opinion written by Judge Stucky. In a nutshell:
We granted review to determine whether the chief of military justice was disqualified from preparing the addendum to the staff judge advocate’s recommendation (SJAR) because, before trial, she had caused the charges to be served on the accused. We hold that she was disqualified under Article 6(c), Uniform
Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), 10 U.S.C. § 806(c) (2006), and Rule for Courts-Martial (R.C.M.) 1106(b), but Appellant was not prejudiced.
Waive it or raise it at work – and at a court-martial under the UCMJ.
Judge Ed Carnes for the Eleventh Circuit in United States v. Rodriguez, No. 08-16696, Dec. 22, 2010:
This case poses the question of whether there is a vindictive judge or cowardly counsel exception to the contemporaneous objection rule. Unless there is such an exception, the only issue that the appellant is pressing on appeal is barred for failure to object because she cannot meet the requirements of the plain error rule. Disagreeing with the Second Circuit, we hold that the possibility a judge may be unhappy with an objection does not excuse the failure to make it.
Attorney John Galligan reports that he continues to be stonewalled on access to a security clearance and discovery.
Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
