Justia Military Law Opinion Summaries

Defendant entered an open plea of guilty, without benefit of a plea agreement, for failing to register as a sex offender in violation of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, 18 U.S.C. 2250. The district court judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison, 20 years of supervised released, and a $100 special assessment fee. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. Defendant's plea of guilty to forcible sodomy (Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 U.S.C. 925), while serving in the Navy, triggered SORNA. The judge's application of a modified categorical approach to examine a limited amount of additional material (the charging instrument) and classify the conviction as a tier one offense was proper. View "United States v. Taylor" on Justia Law

Criminal proceedings were conducted with five defendants, members of the Raven 23 team from Blackwater Worldwide ("Blackwater"), where Blackwater was hired by American security officials to evacuate a diplomat from a car bomb explosion and where there existed a dispute over who fired shots that killed and wounded Iraqi civilians. At issue was whether the district court properly dismissed an indictment against the five defendants on the ground that the evidence presented to the grand jury, and the decision to prosecute two of the defendants, was tainted by statements of defendants. The court held that the district court erred by treating evidence as single lumps and excluding them in their entirety when at the most, only some portion of the content was tainted; by failing to conduct a proper independent-source analysis as required by Kastigar v. United States and United States v. Rinaldi; by applying the wrong legal standard when it excluded a defendant's journal and his testimony simply because the news reports based on some of the immunized statements were "a cause" for his writing it; and to the extent that evidence tainted by the impact of one defendant's immunized statements may be found to have accounted for the indictment of that defendant, it did not follow that the indictment of any other defendant was tainted.

Plaintiffs filed a class action suit for damages against defendant, a former United States Marshal, claiming that they were unconstitutionally strip searched by Deputy U.S. Marshals under defendant's direction after plaintiffs were arrested during a demonstration in September 2002. At issue was whether it was clearly established in September 2002 that strip searching an arrestee before placing him in a detention facility without individualized reasonable suspicion was unconstitutional. The court held that it need not consider whether defendant had individual suspicion as to each of the plaintiffs where there was no clearly established constitutional prohibition in 2002 of strip searching arrestees without individualized, reasonable suspicion and therefore, defendant was entitled to qualified immunity and summary judgment. View "Paul Bame, et al v. Todd Dillard, et al" on Justia Law