An underlying philosophy of American government is that its legitimacy rests on “the consent of the governed,” and that consent is conditioned on public trust that the system will operate justly. The truism that “[n]obody cares how much you know until they know how much you care” applies as much to organizations as it does to individuals. 

2023 Issue 2

There is no more fulfilling job and exhilarating feeling than to stand next to your client when the military judge says, “Accused and defense counsel, please rise,” and then hear the fact-finder state, “To all charges and their specifications, not guilty.” In the more than forty years since its establishment, the U.S. Army Trial Defense Service (USATDS) has provided principled counsel and zealous representation of our Soldiers who defend America, nesting within the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps mission to “provide principled counsel and premier legal services.”

What does it mean to be a special trial counsel (STC) noncommissioned officer (NCO)? What does it mean to be an Army paralegal? While there are many characteristics, traits, and work philosophies that could answer these questions, it is personally meaningful to be able to articulate exactly what it means to be a paralegal within the Office of Special Trial Counsel (OSTC) and what qualities best serve an aspiring NCO. 

Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 seminal work on individual judgment and decision-making, Thinking, Fast and Slow, provides a useful framework for shaping an institutional response to the persistent existence of racial disparities in our military justice system.

There is a fear that embracing the principles of fairness . . . will risk the loss of convictions. But there is far more to be gained by having a system in which all of the participants are fully informed and decisions are based on a thorough exploration of all of the facts of the crime and the circumstances of the person accused of committing it.

Military justice is certainly not new as a practice area within our Army; military justice predates the very founding of our country. Mirroring the history of our own Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps, the practice of military justice can trace its roots all the way back to 1775 and the Articles of War established by the Second Continental Congress.

Cecil L. Forinash, who served in our Corps from 1950 until 1969, had a very successful career as an Army lawyer, including tours as the staff judge advocate (SJA) at Fort Carson, Colorado, Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty), North Carolina, and at VII Corps, Stuttgart, Germany

No one would argue with the statement that military justice in the Army has changed from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when General George Washington commanded a Continental Army of between 10,000 and 25,000 soldiers, to the first quarter of the twenty-first century, when the American Army consists of an active force of some 475,000 men and women, with thousands more in the Army Reserve and Army National Guard. This article explores that change—or evolution—in military justice over the last 250 years.

The residual hearsay exception offers a unique, oft-misunderstood route to overcoming the ubiquitous and dreaded hearsay objection from opposing counsel. Making its original appearance in the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) in 1975, the residual hearsay exception was adopted for courts-martial practice as part of the 1980 amendments to the Military Rules of Evidence (MRE).