Court-Martial Trial Practice

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…

The Blog of Legal Times, 6 February 2009, has this entry: A seventh suspect was arrested and charged today for the murder of Juwan Johnson, the U.S. Army sergeant who was beaten to death by other soldiers during a 2005 gang initiation. Rico Rodrigues Williams, a 31-year-old former Air Force member, was arrested in Chesapeake,…

Lisa Demer, High court to hear Alaska man’s DNA appeal, Anchorage Daily News, 7 February 2009. Osborne was born and raised in South Carolina, graduated high school there. He said he was accepted into The Citadel but it was too expensive, so he joined the Army. SCOTUSWiki has the various documents relevant to District Attorney’s…

Not good? Is that the bottom line coming out of appellate results proffered by CAAFLog, Appellate Relief Data (8 February 2009)? CAAFLog’s own “research” of Air Force opinions yields an approximate 4.7% chance of getting relief, and an undetermined chance of meaningful relief within that number of cases. CAAFLog also points to Major Jeffrey D.…

Check out, Island Justice: Guam Supreme Court Opinion Reveals Important Hearsay & Confrontation Clause Principles, Professor Colin Miller, Evidence Prof Blog, 7 February 2009. They discuss an interesting case of an assault victim. It was six days before police could interview her, and she was interviewed a second time after that. The police office was…