Court Opinion

ID: 9836835
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-02 03:15:12.102218+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:45:19.018533
License: Public Domain

SULLIVAN, Judge
(dissenting):
The granted issue in this ease is:
WHETHER THE LOWER COURT ERRED IN FINDING ERROR AND THEN AWARDING WHAT AMOUNTED TO SHAM RELIEF BECAUSE THAT RELIEF IS EFFECTIVELY NULLIFIED BY THE AUTOMATIC FORFEITURE PROVISION OF ARTICLE 58b, UCMJ.
(Emphasis added.) Appellant appealed his convictions to the court below on the grounds of illegal pretrial punishment. In its decision, the lower court stated:
*148We have carefully examined the record of trial, appellant’s assignment of error that he was illegally punished prior to trial and the Government’s response. We conclude that the appellant’s assignment of error has merit and he is entitled to relief.... We will take corrective action in our decretal paragraph.
Unpub. op. at 1-2 (emphasis added). In that decretal paragraph, the lower court focused its relief on the forfeiture portion of appellant’s sentence and, in effect, reduced the forfeitures from $1,050 pay per month to $600 pay per month for 30 months. This resulted in apparent monetary relief to appellant of $13,500. However, the relief was illusory because, by operation of an automatic forfeiture of pay statute, Article 58b (an authority not mentioned in the lower court’s opinion), appellant received no benefit from the court’s order of relief.
Was this “sham relief’? Was the lower court not aware of Article 58b and its statutory effect on the forfeiture portion of appellant’s sentence when the lower court gave its apparent reduction of $13,500 in forfeitures? Did the lower court make a mistake when it said it was giving relief to appellant, and yet it appears that the “relief’ amounted to no relief? I would remand this case to the lower court. A remand would allow that court to directly confront these questions and to explain what actual “relief’ was meant in its decision. See United States v. Suzuki, 14 MJ 491, 493 (CMA 1983), affd in part and rev’d in part, 20 MJ 248 (CMA 1985). Our system of justice is best served if unanswered questions like these are cleared up in the eyes of the appellant and the public. In addition, on remand, the lower court could also consider the well-reasoned relief proposed by my Brother, Judge Effron, in his excellent separate opinion which analyzes the type of appropriate relief which could be given to appellant.