Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog
Five of the new cases are post-trial delay issues. More on the others later.
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What are they thinking?
The October 2009 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin is online.
This issue has a very nice list, summary, and LE interpretation of each criminal law related Supreme Court decision from last term.
UP: RoT
A Reserve Marine master sergeant at Camp Pendleton was sentenced to a reduction in rank and 60 days confinement after a court martial found him guilty of removing classified documents from files and possessing an unauthorized machine gun.
The members acquitted Master Sgt. Reinaldo Pagan of other specifications involving the alleged mishandling of intelligence files about possible terrorist activities in Southern California.
Pagan, a police officer in the Northern California city of Hayward, is the latest Marine to stand trial in a case involving the alleged leaking of files to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
More of the Dr. Orly show.
Here, if you are not yet bored by the whole subject is the “Attorney’s Notice of Appeal of Sanctions and Related Orders,” for her $20K ding.
She includes as argument
[C]ounsel appeals all aspects of this Court’s Order in Document #28, wherein the Court proved its pervasively extreme and outrageous (extrajudicial) prejudice and bias against the undersigned counsel[.]
Bahrain dog-handler travails.
Stars & Stripes reports that:
After avoiding any punishment for more than two years, Chief Petty Officer Michael Toussaint, who led the division from 2004 to 2006, was recently removed from his leadership post within Naval Special Warfare Group 2 and will be forced into retirement in January. In addition, Navy officials will decide whether Toussaint should be stripped of his rank and retirement pay, Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Elissa Smith said.
Naval investigators have confirmed 93 instances of hazing and sex crimes inside the Bahrain-based canine unit during Toussaint’s tenure as commander, including numerous instances of Toussaint abusing and ridiculing sailors.
Future MRE change – maybe?
Professor Colin Miller at Evidence Prof blog draws attention to a Wisconsin Law Journal article about a proposed change to Fed. R. Evid. 804.
In September, the Judicial Conference of the United States adopted the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules to amend Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3) so that prosecutors, as well as defendants, need to present evidence of corroborating circumstances before admitting statements against interest. This change is based upon opinions by certain courts already adding this requirement, such as the Seventh Circuit in United States v. Garcia, 897 F.2d 1413, 1420 (7th Cir. 1990), and the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Alvarez, 584 F.2d 694, 701 (5th Cir. 1978).
The article notes that the proposed rule change was not controversial because "It operates only against the government, and the government did not oppose it." The government’s lack of opposition was likely based upon the fact that the proposed rule is clearly fair.
MEJA, civilian contractors, and independent security companies.
The Blackwater “incident,” several civilian contactor MEJA cases, have caused concern about the role and ability to control civilian contractors in a war zone.
The international community will have the opportunity to take on [] definitional challenges within the next several years. The United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination—in consultation with researchers, watchdog groups, industry representatives, and other civil society groups—has issued a Draft International Convention on the Regulation, Oversight and Monitoring of Private Military and Security Companies.
Margaret Maffai, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, writes on Closing the Loophole: Private Military Contractors and Rights Violations, on JURIST.
Bahrain hazing case.
I posted a while back about an ongoing issue with the dog-handling unit in Bahrain.
Here’s an update from NPR Youth Radio.
Since then, a Navy officer familiar with the case has told NPR that the report recommended courts-martial for both Toussaint and another noncommissioned officer from the unit. The recommendation for courts-martial was never followed. Instead, the case was closed, and Toussaint received a "non-punitive letter of caution" — the military’s equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
Article 32 – Questioning Justice.
This is a piece on a soon to be released documentary on the “Pendleton 8.” The blogosphere and twitter have been all-a-twitter. The documentary is intended to be a look on the Hamdania prosecutions, plus. The plus appears to be:
The film is called Article 32, its title referring to the part of the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice that deals with preliminary hearings. It’s about the stress and strain of combat, the morally brutalizing environment of Iraq and the gaps between established rules of engagement and the will to survive.
Sikorski and Stewart feel that these eight men were made political scapegoats. Article 32 is meant to provide a full-scope view of what troops are being ordered to do in Iraq. They say their film sheds new light on both the events that happened that night in Hamdania, and the subsequent murder investigation.