United States v. Arroyo

In Arroyo, the Appellant sought sentence relief at AFCCA based on a claim of inappropriateness. The plea agreement said that she could be sentenced to at least 14 days of confinement and a BCD. She was sentenced to 37 days' confinement, reduced to E-2, and a BCD.

​At CAAF, 

granted review to decide whether the AFCCA erred by recognizing the benefit Appellant received from her plea agreement when reviewing the appropriateness of her sentence. An accused’s own sentence proposal is a reasonable indication of the sentence’s probable fairness to the accused. Accordingly, the AFCCA may—to ascertain the fairness and thus the appropriateness of an adjudged sentence—consider the context in which the parties reached the plea agreement, including the benefits from that agreement to the accused. We therefore affirm the decision of the AFCCA.

AFCCA had found the sentence to be inappropriate and reduced the confinement to 14 days, but despite a request, the court did not set aside the BCD. (There was a dissent arguing the BCD was inappropriate.) AFCCA noted,

It is also worth noting in this case that Appellant, with the assistance of competent counsel, negotiated and secured a plea agreement, where she received the benefit of having two specifications of sexual assault withdrawn and dismissed with prejudice, in exchange for her plea of guilty to a separate offense. This benefit not only reduced Appellant’s criminal exposure, but it also ensured Appellant would not be exposed to additional significant collateral consequences that were possible under the dismissed specifications. In exchange for this benefit, Appellant agreed to a minimum punishment that would include at least 14 days of confinement and a bad-conduct discharge.

Arroyo argued at CAAF that AFCCA "improperly and unconstitutionally assumed guilt on the dismissed charges" during its review. CAAF disagreed.

To be clear, we do not suggest that it would be impossible for a service court to violate an appellant’s presumption of innocence when performing sentence appropriateness review or to improperly compare an adjudged sentence to a theoretical maximum sentence from withdrawn specifications. But nothing in the AFCCA’s opinion suggests that it presumed Appellant committed the sexual assaults or used the dismissed charges to justify a harsher sentence than it would otherwise have approved as appropriate. At most, the AFCCA considered why Appellant agreed that a bad-conduct discharge was a fair punishment for her assault of A1C LP.