Court-Martial Trial Practice

The Air Force’s top enlisted leader is looking into an incident involving an airman who was sent a Letter of Reprimand and a Letter of Counseling shortly after attempting suicide, so reports Task & Purpose. The airman said their unit, the 460th Space Wing’s Dental Flight based at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo., was plagued…

The NDAA veto having been overridden, look for changes to Articles 6b, 66, 67, 140a. Review amendments.–The amendments made by subsections (b) and (c) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply with respect to any case in which every finding of guilty entered into the record under…

The now law NDAA for 2021 has a number of provisions including this one. If you are not aware, compassion fatigue is a real thing even for lawyers, more for defense counsel and SVC’s than prosecutors. If you have compassion fatigue that can adversely affect your court-room work as well as relationships with others in…

Prof. Colin Miller notes that prosecutor discipline for Brady violations is “rarer than steak tartare.” He reports to case of a NY prosecutor suspended for two-years because of significant Brady violations. On May 9, 2017, the former homicide prosecutor was caught withholding exculpatory material from Messiah Booker, a man charged with first-degree murder who had…

The Peace and Justice Initiative describes command responsibility as, “Command or superior responsibility” is often misunderstood. First, it is not a form of objective liability whereby a superior could be held criminally responsible for crimes committed by subordinates of the accused regardless of his conduct and regardless of what his knowledge of these crimes. Nor…

United States v. Jones., NMCCA 23 December 2020. Appellant challenged the providence of his guilty pleas, alleged an abuse of discretion with the admission of various sentencing exhibits; and (again) an error in the entry of judgement. The findings and sentence were affirmed, but an amended EoJ was ordered. The issue appears to come from…

Stuart Ford’s article, Has President Trump Committed a War Crime by Pardoning War Criminals? 35 AM. U. INT’L. L. REV. 757 (2020) seeks to answer that from an international law perspective through the lens of command responsibility. Command responsibility generally has two sides–the duty to prevent and the duty to punish. One interesting question is…

The military trial judge erred in concluding that the search authorization required AFOSI complete information to determine probable cause for defendant’s DNA in a sex assault case. It’s not. Just because there were differing versions of how dressed the victim was when she woke up doesn’t make the authorization without probable cause. After the first…

The head of Hill Air Force Base’s Equal Opportunity Office has been reassigned after failing to take complaints of sexual harassment seriously. As part of the investigation, it appears two attorneys were referred to the Professional Responsibility Program for the Air Force Judge Advocate General Corps. That office has initiated a separate inquiry into the…

Kentucky has a similar variant of Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(1). In its recent opinion in Estate of Karen Burden v. Hardison, 2020 WL 7640000 (Ky.App. 2000), the Court of Appeals of Kentucky dealt with one element of this exception and left another element for another day–says Prof. Colin Miller. The trial court in Hardison had…