Wednesday, February 27, 2008

JO'C on military appellate review

Sacre bleu, JO'C has been holding out on us. Here's a citation to his new law review article: John F. O'Connor, Foolish Consistencies and the Appellate Review of Courts-Martial, 41 Akron L. Rev. 175 (2008).

4 comments:

John O'Connor said...

Not holding out. I hadn't even seen it yet.

Anonymous said...

What would JO'C do without CAAFlog? Would he have even been motivated to write Foolish Consistencies were it not for the relatively liberal horde he battles in CAAFlog comments every day? Who knows, but I will count among CAAFlog's contributions to society the balancing of military justice perspectives that has occurred in the last one and a half years . . . Wow it's been that long.

John O'Connor said...

"Battle" in only the friendliest sense, Anonymous.

I would definitely say that CAAFlog has helped me focus and tighten my own thinking on military justice, particularly court-martial appellate practice. I will say that the kernel of an idea in "Foolish Consistencies" predated CAAFlog in my head, but I can't say whether I would have put pen to paper, so to speak.

Anonymous said...

Well written article -- certainly better than my thesis at the JAG School three years ago entitled "It's Time to Empower the Accused to Sell What He Can Waive:A Proposal to Authorize Waiver of Appellate Review By Pretrial Agreement." Within my thesis, I proposed serveral changes to the RCMs and Art 61 in order to allow an accused to negotiate a waiver of his appeal. I didn't go as far as JO'C and included a revocation clause that would allow an accused to revoke the waiver up to 10 days after CA's Action (this eliminates "unknowing waivers" regarding post-trial errors and CAAF's paternalistic concern that waivers made in the heat of the moment are bad), but the cost of doing so would be to lose his confinement cap or other bargained for exchange. About a year ago, the SJA to CMC and the JAG (or at least the Crim Law AJAG) pushed my proposal (further refined by LtCol Jeff Colwell then at JAM) to the JSC where, as of this fall, it has died on the vine. I never got around to doing the editing suggested by the Mil Law Review staff to get my thesis published and had recently made a half hearted promise to do so after hearing the JSC killed my idea. Maybe this article will be incentive I need to pull the dust off my potential article.
Semper Fi,
LtCol John Baker (I'm a blogging newbie and don't know how to not be "anonymous.")