Judges confronted with allegations of racial or ethnic bias among jurors are allowed to investigate the claims, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled yesterday. The opinion created a new exception to case law historically barring judges from questioning jurors about their process.
Kittle v. United States, quotable quotes.
Well, the military has a sort of probation, but it’s not well formalized. Suspending a sentence is a form of unsupervised probation. Maybe some more detailed supervision would be appropriate. No reason a commander can’t do that already – conditions on suspending punishment. Also, the Services – well the Air Force and Army used to have a fairly vibrant return to duty program. Whether these programs will be available is a different question in today’s drawdown environment.
Army JA MAJ Evan R. Seamone is something of a leader in writing about actions for military personnel suffering combat related PTSD and TBI. So this piece is not unexpected.
If the civilian justice system has embraced treatment courts that care for veterans stricken with combat stress and brain injuries instead of punishing them, why can’t the military justice system? It can and it should, asserted Maj. Evan Seamone, the chief of military justice at Fort Benning, Ga., in an article published in the most recent issue of the journal Military Law Review.
I follow Prof. Colin Miller’s EvidenceProf blog daily. Didn’t realize it until now, but his “work” is available in eBooks for Legal Education.
This is a product from the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, and some of it appears to be free.
The ever pithy Prof. Colin Miller has an excellent post about issues under Mil. R. Evid. 1004.
The best evidence rule is now in Mil. R. Evid. 1004. The rule requires originals, not and/or, unless the original is lost or destroyed. So, when you object make that distinction clear. Prosecutors and military judges often conflate the rule into, a it doesn’t matter rule. Before the prosecution can use copies they have to establish that the original is lost or destroyed.
Now, what happens if the original is lost or destroyed due to the fault of the possessor of the original – for example the victim destroys text messages or other information, in bad faith.
Anything by Prof. Leo is well worth the read.
Richard A. Leo (University of San Francisco – School of Law) has posted Why Interrogation Contamination Occurs (Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The problem of police interrogation contamination (disclosing or leaking of non-public facts) is pervasive in documented false confessions leading to wrongful conviction. The presence of unique and detailed crime facts in a false confession creates the illusion that the defendant volunteered inside information about the crime that “only the true perpetrator could have known,” thus seemingly corroborating a false confession as verifiably true. This article argues that confession contamination occurs because (1) the guilt-presumptive psychology of American police interrogation is designed to trigger and perpetuate confirmation biases that (2) lead investigators – seemingly inadvertently – to provide detailed case information to suspects as part of their pre- and post-admission accusatory interrogation strategies, but (3) has no internal corrective mechanism to catch or reverse investigators’ misclassification errors or their confirmatory interrogation techniques.
The general rule is that you are stuck with the record on appeal and can’t supplement it with new or additional facts.
There are however some limited exceptions to the general rule for items of appellate judicial notice. Here is a short piece discussing some of the exceptions.
An example from military appeals:
http://www.denverda.org/dna/DNA_Nonhuman.htm
Thanks to BW, who shall remain otherwise anonymous.
Opinions, published and unpublished.
A nice discussion of judicial opinions in military cases can be found at
United States v. Clifton, 35 M.J. 79 (C.M.A. 1992).
We’ve seen some recent cases discussing the issue of over zealous argument by trial counsel on the merits. What to do, oh what to do.
How about object!
And,
NATIONAL CLEARINGHOUSE FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & THE LAW
at
Stetson University College of Law
“SHARING KNOWLEDGE TO PROMOTE JUSTICE”
The relationship between law and science and technology has been called both an essential alliance and a reluctant embrace, Sheila Jasanoff, Science at the Bar: Law, Science and Technology in America (1996).
Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog