Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
United States v. Martin, ACCA April 2020.
On appeal, Appellant argued that six separate convictions of Art. 107 were UMC under the circumstances, but
Appellant’s UMC claim never gets off the ground. Appellant contends that because the “criminality behind” his Article 107 convictions was not the statements themselves, but rather the fact that appellant made the statements “in order to steal money from the government,” his separate Article 107 convictions represented an unreasonable multiplication of charges.
This argument demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of Article 107. The “criminality behind” appellant’s false official statements was the falsehood of those statements. An Article 107 conviction does not depend on the false statement having been made to effectuate an underlying crime; each false official statement is a free-standing crime in-and-of itself, notwithstanding the speaker’s underlying motivation.
“This is not to say that false official statements can never be unreasonably multiplied.” E.g., same date and conversation.