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The President has signed an Executive Order amending the Manual for Courts-Martial (which includes the rules of evidence) for 2016. Of significance, it will be even harder to challenge the admission of “confessions” or “admissions” of the accused. The current rule states that: “evidence obtained as a result of an unlawful search or seizure made…

Well I see the FOIA site is up in Bergdahl per the MJ’s order. https://www.foia.army.mil/ReadingRoom/Detail.aspx?id=103 There’s the normal minutiae for early appellate exhibits, the EDN for example. Of most interest may be the DSM-5 diagnoses of: Schizotypal Disorder at the time of the offense, and that plus PTSD now. Bottom line, the military docs are…

There is an interesting issue in the UK about an outspoken general officer commenting on political matters. As you read the article below you’ll see that the UK is no different than the US in response to outspoken flag and general officers. Philip Hammond ‘tried to court-martial senior general’, new book claims General Sir Richard…

The members selection process is often at issue in a court-martial. One of the common concerns is the selection based purely on rank–usually the very senior. So, CAAF is about to enter the discussion again based on a grant yesterday. No. 16-0391/MC. U.S. v. Emmanuel Q. Bartee. CCA 201500037. On consideration of the petition for…

The CAAF has decided United States v. Rogers, __ M.J. ___ (C.A.A.F. 2016) today. The issue under consideration was a challenge to a member–the senior member–for implied bias that was (as CAAF now says, wrongly) denied by the military judge. The issue and decisions are not so troubling; the whole question of challenges to members…

The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces has been active recently in a number of grants of review. What is noteworthy has been the grant of three cases in which it was the client who raised an issue through a United States v. Grostefon pleading. This confirms my own thought that Grostefon issues ought…

There are two ways a military prisoner gets out: serve to their minimum release date or get parole. Either way, the person is going to be placed into a strict form of post-release conditions. For those who get to their MRD they will go into the Mandatory Supervised Release Program. MSR (Mandatory Supervised Release) is…

You are confined, your case is appealed, your case is reversed and a new trial ordered. You will stay in confinement–pretrial confinement. But what about all the pay you lost while confined. This happened to Garcia, and after retrial he’d served two years of what became a two month sentence. We raised the issue of…

“Washington’s Supreme Court has thrown out the convictions of three men in what police called a gang-related shooting, finding among other things that music on one defendant’s phone was not evidence of gang ties.” That’s the headline from the Seattle Times. The slip opinion in State (Washington) v. Deleon is here. Interesting as I have…

Adam M. Gershowitz, The Post-Riley Search Warrant: Search Protocols and Particularity in Cell Phone Searches, 69 Vand. L. Rev. 585 (2016) Margaret Dodson, Bruton on Balance: Standardizing Redacted Codefendant Confessions Through Federal Rule of Evidence 403, 69 Vand. L. Rev. 803 (2016)