Articles Posted in Sentencing

Your military defense counsel will discuss with you the terms and requirements of a pretrial agreement, should you decide it is in your best interest to get “a deal.” However, once that deal is signed, the judge accepts it, and it is now on appeal, it is hard to get the appellate court to reduce…

Here is something from good friend Don Rehkopf as a reminder to defense counsel. 1) For anyone representing a client with Art. 120, offenses that will trigger a Dismissal or DD upon conviction; or 2) Anyone representing a client where there may be a chance of being sentenced to a Dismissal or DD; To avoid…

Military prisoners may go on MSRP at their MRD unless going into parole. There are many conditions and some consequences for failure to follow the rules. With that in mind, we may need to pay attention and give some thought to: United States v. Haymond, decided today (26 June 2019) by the Supremes. The opinion…

Prof. Doug Berman of Sentencing Law & Policy brings this tidbit about SOR in Alaska. [T]he Alaska Supreme Court in Doe v. Alaska Department of Public Safety, No. 7375 (Alaska June 14, 2019) decided that part of its state’s Sexual Offender Registration Act violates due process. Here is how the majority opinion starts and concludes:…

An accused in pretrial confinement awaiting trial receives day for day credit toward any sentence to confinement. In the old days, we referred to that as “Allen credit.” Note, an accused may not automatically get credit for time spent in civilian jail–that needs to be litigated at trial. See United States v. Harris, __ M.J.…

As this case demonstrates, the novelty of an assimilative charging decision under Article 134 often wears off during the course of an appeal, Says ACCA in a footnote to United States v. Meredith, 7 August 2018. Specification 1 of Charge II alleged appellant violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 10 U.S.C. § 1030,…

Navy Times reports the NMCCA decision in United States v. Saugen. “Ensign Joseph P. Saugen, 26, remains in San Diego’s Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar serving a three-year sentence after pleading guilty to two specifications of possessing child pornography and another for distributing the illicit videos.” In Saugen, the Appellant executed a pretrial agreement. One of…

I always tell clients that the specific sex offender registration requirements are complicated and depend on state law. Here’s a reason why. In New York a defendant can be forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life based on accusations a jury rejected. So the state’s highest court ruled last…

I have argued for some time that sex offender registration is punitive not merely collateral to a conviction. This morning, the US Supreme Court granted cert in Gundy v. US to consider whether Congress’s delegation to the attorney general the power to issue regulations interpreting the federal Sex Offender Notification and Registration Act violates the…

It is common to obtain character and rehabilitation letters for a service-member at trial. There is an art to getting and using good letters. Rule 1, don’t have a letter (or testimony) in which the writer impeaches the verdict. “This is out of character,” or something to that effect is much better and won’t draw…