Court-Martial Trial Practice

CAAFLog has noted that NMCCA has scheduled oral argument in United States v. Craig, No. NMCCA 200800716 The two issues are: I. WHETHER THE APPELLANT’S GUILTY PLEA TO DISTRIBUTION OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY WAS IMPROVIDENT, AS THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE THAT APPELLANT DELIVERED ANY UNLAWFUL IMAGES TO ANYONE?II. WHETHER THE MILITARY JUDGE COMMITTED PLAIN ERROR WHEN…

The Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals updated their opinions today. Several may have value for discussion, more later.

Earlier I posted an item on how to interpret email headers. Here is an interesting article about the email headers — metadata. Tresa Baldas, Metadata Grows in Legal Import, The National L. J., 26 January 2009. In cases where the prosecution evidence consists of emails, metadata may be very helpful to you. I recently had…

I wanted to follow-up on some thoughts regarding my “office-in-a-briefcase” (which many of you know is literally true for me). You can find suitable scanners, color printers, and of course computers, which can fit within one briefcase. All you need at that point is access to the internet. Internet access in this day and age…

Colin Miller, Into The Dawn To Montana: Montana Moves Closer To Adopting Sex Crime Character Evidence Rules, 9 February 2009. A reminder that rules of evidence are in many instances political responses, not reality.

It occurs to me that most suspects interrogated by NCIS, CID, OSI, CGIS, have never seen the “rights’ form they have you sign. So if you’ve not seen it in advance, it’s harder to know what it is and how to complete it. Here is an example, and it is pretty uniform across the Services…

As a result of the current National Guard and Reserve activations I, like many of my colleagues, find ourselves representing Guard or Reserve clients at court-martial. From time to time they ask if they can have Guard or Reservists on their Members Panel (jury). The answer is no they can’t require Guard or Reserve panel…

I have two little helpers useful to cutting and pasting. Pure Text (Free-shareware). This little goodie allows you to copy text from the web, for example, and then paste to your document using your font, but without all of the formatting from the original text. If used in conjunction with WordPerfect 12 or WordPerfect X-4,…

Criminal lawyers can’t learn from civil practice lawyers and vice-versa? Let’s think of an Article 32, UCMJ, hearing as a deposition. In most cases it has the effect of a deposition in terms of fodder for cross-examination, direct, or preparation at trial (except for Air Force cases). [1] Also, in certain circumstances the Article 32,…

Professor Solum is getting some play in the legal blogs over the last day or so. Professor Solum explains the interpretation-construction distinction, in 8 February 2009, Legal Theory Lexicon: Interpretation and Construction, post. We can roughly define these two activities as follows: * Interpretation: The activity of determining the linguistic meaning (or semantic content) of…