Thursday, October 23, 2008

October issue of Army Lawyer online

The October issue of the Army Lawyer is now online here. Military justice types will be interested in an article by Major Elizabeth Harvey of Code 46 called Sentencing Credit for Pretrial Restriction, which is available here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, I read the first part of the article, the Introduction, and I don't know if I am going to finish it.

In the first part, where she posits that an accused not receiving sentence credit for pretrial restriction is inequitable, she notes that with pretrial confinement, an accused is entitled to day-for-day credit where with pretrial restriction, the accused is only entitled to consideration of the restriction in deciding on an appropriate sentence. She then says in a footnote:

"In practice, sentences do not seem to be reduced much if at all based upon this 'consideration' of the duration of pretrial restriction unless it is exceptionally long."

She cites no authority for this and offers no empirical evidence to substantiate such a remark. I know, you could say, hey anon, you didn;t read the rest of the article, maybe that comes later, but it is does, then an "infra" cite would be appropriate, which leads me to believe that she has nothing to back up such an assertion.

That is vital, because her article and her position rests on the belief that an accused who serves pretrial confinement and an accused who serves pretrial restriction will receive the same sentence for the same offense.

Damn irresponsible if you ask me.

Anonymous said...

Drive by.