Here is a North County Times report:

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, its agents, Camp Pendleton military police and a San Diego Marine staff judge advocate on behalf of a North County woman who alleges they violated her constitutional rights with intimidation and harassment. “NCIS retaliated against Ms. Martin because she is a zealous, effective defense investigator. Special Agent Martin and his colleagues seized Ms. Martin for hours without justification, pounded on her front door near dawn one morning to falsely “charge” her with a federal felony … spied on her at her home and traumatized her in other ways,” the civil complaint said. A staff judge advocate is a legal adviser to base officials. Before Sullivan took the job at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, he prosecuted multiple cases arising from the alleged incidents at Haditha, Iraq. He is still involved in that case.

This would be one of the prosecutors in the Wuterich case.

As the case unfolds, Mr. Patterson gives the reader a tutorial in military justice as well as the complexities of PTSD. He also makes clear his stand against the war through testimonies from personnel involved with McCarran in Iraq. The tension rises throughout the court-martial: Will the judge allow PTSD as a defense? Will the jury believe how the war changed not just McCarran, but the man he killed?

Haven’t read it and probably won’t until it’s free. Hollywood did for me watching fictional movies about military justice (remember all the issues in A Few Good Men, and of course JAG, and Navy NCIS [how sweet that a show about NCIS should be called Navy Navy Criminal Investigative Service])

Despite the federal court ruling in California, it would be unwise for active duty servicemembers who are gay to assume the military will immediately change its policy.

The Frontiersman reports (this is Ramrod Five related):

In addition to murder, Morlock is also now charged with using an illegal drug, hashish, and with beating a civilian “on the body with his hands and feet, threatening to kill him if he spoke about hashish use within the platoon,” the amended charging document says.

Here is a link to a New York Times article which is part of its Women in the News section and focuses on the judge.

In her 86-page opinion, she called the law, passed by Congress in 1993, an unconstitutional violation of First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and Fifth Amendment guarantees of substantive due process.

CAAFLog reports that Sgt Quintanilla was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday.

Sgt Quintanilla was convicted in 1996 of the premeditated murder of his squadron’s executive officer, the attempted premeditated murder of his squadron’s commanding officer, and the attempted premeditated murder of a gunnery sergeant. In 2005, the Navy-Marine Corps Court set aside the findings and sentence. 60 M.J. 852. In 2006, CAAF reversed the portion of NMCCA’s opinion setting aside the findings, but affirmed the portion setting aside the sentence. 63 M.J. 29.

The crimes and trial occurred before life without parole was a permissible sentence.

CAAF action in United States v. Trigueros, a discovery case. CAAF denied a petition. See posting about the case here.

News-Press reports: (related to Ramrod Five Article 32s)

The parents of a U.S. soldier from Cape Coral who, with other troops, is accused of killing Afghan civilians say they have evidence their son is innocent. Christopher Winfield, the father of Army Spc. Adam Winfield, 22, says he tried five times to pass urgent Internet messages from his son to the Army. Troops in his unit had killed an Afghan civilian, planned more killings and threatened him to keep quiet about it.

See also this New York Times piece.

BOLO: The AP reports:

Four prisoners with links to al-Qaida being guarded by American troops escaped from a maximum-security prison in Baghdad and are still at large, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday. . . . U.S. troops found two detainees attempting to escape from the compound on Wednesday evening, the military said in a statement. When they conducted a sweep of the whole facility, they discovered that four other detainees were missing. This is not the first time that prisoners have broken out of American-run detention facilities in Iraq; 11 Iraqis broke out of the U.S.’s Camp Bucca in April 2005 although many were later recaptured. A month earlier U.S. officials there discovered a 600-foot tunnel leading out of Camp Bucca. In 2006, five detainees escaped from the Fort Suse Theater internment facility near Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad; they were later apprehended by Kurdish security officials.

Are you being stalked – by the police? That’s becoming the fourth amendment issue de jour. I posted about x, and here is a piece in the Washington Times that sets the issue up nicely. There is a great deal of attention paid to stalkers who take advantage of technology to victimize people for fun or hate – behavior characterized as creepy.

A dissenting judge in that case wrote that the police behavior was “creepy and un-American.”

Texas senator is demanding answers from the Air Force on the current status of the 10 AWOL Afghan military deserters, which he called a breach of national security.

The initial number of Afghans being floated was 17. Now:

Ten of the 17 remain at large after seven were accounted for, sources close to the situation told Fox News on Friday. The most recent Afghan to disappear from Lackland was First Lt. Javed Aryan, who went AWOL in January 2010, Emery told FoxNews.com. The others listed in the NCIS report disappeared at various times last year. Sources also said that as of November 2009, one of the deserters was in Canada, one is now a lawful permanent resident in the U.S., one has left the country and another four are in federal custody and in removal proceedings. The other 10 remain unaccounted for.

Officials note that:

“In 2009, the Defense Language Institute English Language Center reported two other students from countries other than Afghanistan went missing,” he told FoxNews.com. “They include one Iraqi who requested asylum in Houston and one Djiboutian whose status is unknown. To date in 2010, one student from Tunisia and one from Guinea Bissau have gone AWOL in addition to the Afghani student [Aryan] who went AWOL in January. “To put these numbers in perspective,” Emery said, “more than 3,400 international students entered training at DLI in 2009, including 228 from Afghanistan.”

The names and date of birth of the missing is listed here.

Davis & Leo on the “Sympathetic Detective” Interrogation Strategy Deborah Davis and Richard A. Leo (University of Nevada, Reno and University of San Francisco – School of Law) have posted Selling Confession: Setting the Stage with the ‘Sympathetic Detective with a Time-Limited Offer’ (Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The effectiveness of an interrogation tactic dubbed the “sympathetic detective with a time limited offer” was tested. Participants read two versions of an interrogation transcript, with and without the tactic. Those who read the sympathetic detective version believed the detective had greater authority to determine whether and with what to charge the suspect, more beneficent intentions toward the suspect, and viewed confession as more wise. However, regression analyses indicated that for innocent suspects, only perceptions of the strength of evidence against the suspect and the detective’s beneficence and authority predicted the perceived wisdom of false confession. Interrogation tactics were generally effective, as indicated by participant recommendations of confession (versus invoking Miranda, denial, or continuing to talk without admitting guilt) for both innocent (16.7%) and guilty (74.4%) suspects; and reasons offered for participants’ recommendations for confession versus other choices generally conformed to those reported by real-life confessors and interrogation scholars.

Courtesy CrimProfBlog.

You’ll recollect the tale of Navy Captain Lisa Nowak, commented here.

Officials from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service last week took custody of the evidence in the case of former NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak, a Navy captain.

Florida Today reports. The report has an excellent time-line of the strange events in this case.