The record of trial in Appellant’s case is returned to the Chief Trial Judge, Air Force Trial Judiciary, for correction under R.C.M. 1112(d) to account for the missing audio of the closed session of court, missing Appellate Exhibit VI, and any other portion of the record that is determined to be missing or defective hereafter, after consultation with the parties.

​The record of trial in Appellant’s case is returned to the Chief Trial Judge, Air Force Trial Judiciary, for correction under R.C.M. 1112(d) to account for the complete and correct version of Prosecution Exhibit 9, complete version of Appellate Exhibit LIX, and any other portion of the record that is determined to be missing or defective hereafter, after consultation with the parties.

​Requiring a search authorization to be limited to seizing evidence of only a specific crime seems inconsistent with established caselaw. An authorization to search a residence for a missing person allows the investigators to look anywhere in the residence that a person could be hidden, but allows them to seize any evidence of any crime that they find as long as they find that evidence in a place that a person could be (ie in a closet, not a desk drawer). This ruling is basically saying 'ignore the corpses of dead children, you are only allowed to seize evidence of drug possession' This is a huge change.

​After about five hours of deliberation Friday and an overnight break, Jimenez — the chief circuit military judge with the Air Force Trial Judiciary, Western Circuit, at Travis Air Force Base, California — ruled Cooley is guilty of forcibly kissing the woman, the first specification in a single charge of abusive sexual contact. He is not guilty of two other specifications of groping her and moving her hand to touch his genitals over his clothes, she said.

Former Army officer AV2 was allegedly sexually assaulted by Master Sergeant Clinton Murray and is a witness in Murray's upcoming military court trial. The military judge overseeing Murray's case ruled that certain communications between AV2 and a Department of Veterans Affairs psychotherapist were not protected from disclosure under the Military Rules of Evidence. AV2 sought relief in the two military appellate courts, but both affirmed the military judge's ruling.
AV2 now asks the Court to "revise and correct" what she believes all three military courts got wrong. The Defendants moved to dismiss the case, and the Court, after reviewing the parties' briefing and holding oral argument, grants the Motion. Some of AV2's claims are barred by sovereign and judicial immunities, while the Court lacks subject matter and equitable jurisdiction to review the rest. With isolated exceptions not applicable here, Article III courts do not have the authority to review military judges' rulings.

Unit commanders in the Navy and Marine Corps will no longer have investigative authority over sexual harassment allegations, according to a department-wide message sent Friday by Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro.
​
Effective immediately, the message says, commanding officers must escalate complaints to the next higher-level commander, who will then appoint an investigating officer. That investigator should be from outside the command and "shall not be familiar with the subject or the complainant," the message says.

Today, Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA), Chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personal and Co-Chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, and Congressman Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), were joined by Representatives Veronica Escobar (D-TX), Troy Balderson (R-OH), Sylvia Garica (D-TX), Tony Gonzales (R-TX), and Anthony Brown (D-MD), in introducing the Sexual Harassment Independent Investigations and Prosecutions (SHIIP) Act to remove sexual harassment from the military chain of command. Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower, is introducing her companion legislation today as well, which marks the two-year anniversary of the murder of Army SPC Vanessa Guillén.
. . . 
Specifically, the SHIIP Act extends protections against sexual harassment that Chair Speier secured in the FY22 NDAA, but were stripped out in conference.

[T]he bill would:

• Move prosecutorial decisions for sexual harassment from commanders to the new special trial counsel, created by the FY22 NDAA, so that independent military attorneys decide which sex-related offenses go to court-martial, and
• Require that the new, independent sexual harassment investigators created by the FY22 NDAA are outside of the chain of command of the victim and the subject and are trained in investigating sexual harassment.

We granted review to determine whether the military judge erred when he concluded that Appellant voluntarily provided his cell phone’s passcode to law enforcement. We hold that under the totality of the circumstances, Appellant did voluntarily provide his passcode and thus the military judge did not abuse his discretion in denying a defense motion to suppress incriminating evidence derived from Appellant’s cell phone. We therefore affirm the judgment of the United States Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA).

​We granted review on the following issue: Did the military judge and the court below err in finding that Appellant voluntarily provided his smart phone passcode to law enforcement when the law enforcement official conducting the interrogation asserted that he possessed a search authorization for the phone and Appellant only provided his passcode because Appellant believed he had “no choice?”

Appellant makes two main arguments. First, Appellant avers that his entry of the passcode was involuntary because he merely acquiesced to a claim of authority. However, we note that the Fourth Amendment consent cases that Appellant cites in support of his claim are not on point.  . . . Appellant next argues that his refusal to consent to a search of his phone five times “is direct evidence that he did not voluntarily provide his phone’s passcode.” However, we are not persuaded that, standing alone, five refusals to consent to a search make a subsequent entry and provision of a passcode involuntary. Key to our analysis here is the military judge’s factual findings that the investigator used a professional tone at all times and did not engage in threats, abuse, or coercion.

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Brenner Fissell

Editor

The U.S. legal posture towards Afghanistan, therefore, holds ongoing significance. Specifically, we need to ask the question: Does the United States still consider itself to be waging a forever war against terrorist groups in Afghanistan?
The answer so far appears to be yes, even though U.S. President Biden proclaimed that, with the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from the territory, “the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan — the longest war in American history.” But while fighting against the Taliban may be over (at least for now), Biden has also signaled that the United States will rely on  “over-the-horizon” capabilities to continue the war against terrorist groups in Afghanistan. Indeed, it seems the Biden administration decidedly has not declared the end of the forever war legal paradigm. To the contrary, the U.S. government continues to take the position that it is engaged in a broad, ongoing, transnational armed conflict against al-Qaeda and terrorist groups, including in Afghanistan, and that the dominant international legal framework governing extraterritorial operations against these groups therefore is the law of war, also known as international humanitarian law (IHL).
Why does it matter whether or not we are formally still at war?