Under Article 62, UCMJ, the prosecution can appeal a military judge’s trial ruling under six circumstances. The two most common are: (A) An order or ruling of the military judge which terminates the proceedings with respect to a charge or specification. For example, a military judge dismisses a specification because…
The CAAF daily journal for 15 June 2017 has this entry: No. 17-0003/AR. U.S. v. Christopher B. Hukill. CCA 20140939. On consideration of Appellee’s petition for reconsideration of this Court’s decision, United States v. Hukill, 76 M.J. 219 (C.A.A.F. 2017), it is ordered that said petition for reconsideration be, and…
CAAF’s Daily Journal has this entry for 8 March 2017. No. 17-0226/AF. U.S. v. Dorian K. Owens. CCA 38834. On consideration of the petition for grant of review of the decision of the United States Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals, it is ordered that said petition is hereby granted…
CBS news has picked up this: A former Fort Bragg soldier who killed four women and raped others more than 25 years ago is again headed for execution. The Fayetteville Observer reports Ronald Gray last week lost a battle to keep in place a federal court’s order issued eight years…
John Wesley Hall’s website is an excellent resource for issues involving the Fourth Amendment–FourthAmendment.com. In pointing to a search warrant case Mr. Hall quotes from the opinion. We remind McCollum’s counsel that “the statement of facts in an appellate brief should be a concise narrative of the facts stated in…
Packingham v. North Carolina is the case of Lester Packingham, a North Carolina man who became a registered sex offender after he was convicted, at the age of 21, of taking indecent liberties with a minor. Six years after Packingham’s conviction, North Carolina enacted a law that made it a…
SCOTUSBlog has an interesting post about the court’s relist practice. Some of us discussed the relist option when the court was considering the petition in United States v. Sullivan, 74 M.J. 448 (C.A.A.F. 2015) cert. denied. When last we wrote about the statistics of relists a little over a year…
The Army Court of Criminal Appeals has decided United States v. Hennis, the military’s latest death penalty appeal. The opinion is 106 pages long, so it will take a little time read. But what struck me immediately were the statistics. The case was heard en banc. However, of 12 judges…
In United States v. Lopez, Army Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed, but there is no opinion on the Army court website and I don’t see it in Lexis. The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces has specified an issue for review in this case as follows: No. 16-0487/AR. U.S.…
This article showed that the vast majority of court-martial sentences are affirmed by AFCCA. On the rare occasion when sentence relief was granted, it was usually not based on factual sufficiency or sentence appropriateness. While there has been some fluctuation in how often AFCCA grants sentence relief, it is minimal…