Court-Martial Trial Practice

NMCCA has decided United States v. Owens. The appellant asserts that the attorney-client relationship with his detailed trial defense counsel was terminated without good cause, leaving the appellant legally and factually without post-trial representation. The basis for the appellant’s claim is that substitute counsel failed to establish an attorney-client relationship with the appellant prior to…

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 5. New Rule: Amendment: Fed. R. Civ. P. 26: Expert Disclosure 6.…

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. Thanx, Marine Times.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…