Court-Martial Trial Practice

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…

Friend and colleague Cully Stimson has a piece on military justice practitioner professionalism, similar to some others he has put out recently. He is right on. Of course this is nothing new. I came on active duty as a navy judge advocate in January 1908. The topics Cully talks were a topic then and have…

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…

Practitioners of military justice have been dealing with change over the last years due primarily to different approaches to sexual assault cases. Friend and colleague Cully Stimson has a published piece from his and his organization’s perspective. Take a look. The 2015 Report of the Military Justice Review Group: Reasonable Next Steps in the Ongoing…

The Guardian reports, Detective criticised for ‘getting too close’ in alleged rape case, 9 May 2016. A senior judge has criticised a police detective and the Crown Prosecution Service for their handling of an accusation of gang rape after the case against four young men collapsed just as their trial was due to begin. Judge…

“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…

The Army legal websites are back en clair, having been unavailable to the public for about five to six weeks. Of course, they came back up just as the AFCCA and CAAF were going dark. Anyway. United States v. Commisso, No. 20140205 (A. Ct. Crim. App. 29 April 2016), has an interesting discussion and resolution…

· Police can tell when a suspect is lying · People confess only when they have actually committed the crime they are being charged with · Most judges and jurors fully understand court instructions · Eye-witnesses are always the most reliable source of case-related information · Most mentally ill individuals are violent · All psychopaths…

Working with expert witnesses can be difficult for even the most seasoned attorneys and trial consultants. Oftentimes, egos and expertise can get in the way of an expert’s ability to deliver persuasive testimony, requiring attorneys and trial consultants to be creative when developing solutions that fit both the problem and the expert witness. As trial…