Court Opinion

ID: 9836955
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-02 03:15:40.164486+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:45:19.519250
License: Public Domain

SULLIVAN, Judge, with whom EFFRON, Judge,
joins (dissenting):
Judicial scrutiny of a pretrial agreement by a trial judge is well established in the military justice system. United States v. Bartley, 47 MJ 182, 186 (1997). Yet, today, the majority allows alteration of the pretrial agreement in this case by means of a post-trial modification without such judicial scrutiny. It admits that the voluntariness of appellant’s post-trial agreement is essential; however, it assesses that voluntariness based only on the parties’ arguments on appeal and the terms of the post-trial agreement itself. In effect, the majority ignores this Court’s precedent mandating judicial scrutiny of pretrial agreements and the President’s orders for such scrutiny under RCM 910(f)(1) — (4), Manual for Courts-Martial, United States (1995 ed.).1 United States v. Green, 1 MJ 453 (CMA 1976); United States v. King, 3 MJ 458 (CMA 1977); United States v. Dawson, 10 MJ 142 (CMA 1981).
The convening authority was bound by the original pretrial agreement in this case. Cf. Cooke v. Orser, 12 MJ 335 (CMA 1982). The subsequent post-trial agreement authorized the convening authority, after appellant’s court-martial, to alter his agreed-to-punishment. See Waller v. Swift, 30 MJ 139, 143 (CMA 1990). The majority opinion sanctions such an alteration, simply because appellant submitted a request to do so. Mutual assent of the parties alone, however, is not sufficient to render a pretrial agreement valid. See generally Dawson, 10 MJ 142.
In sum, appellant’s pretrial agreement was undermined and turned into an “empty ritual” because the post-trial agreement supplanted it. See United States v. Rivera, 46 MJ 52, 54 (1997), citing United States v. Allen, 8 USCMA 504, 25 CMR 8 (1957). This Court has no authenticated record on which to judge the voluntariness, scope, and legality of the later agreement. There is no value to judicial scrutiny of a pretrial agreement at trial when you can evade such scrutiny by means of an unsupervised post-trial agreement. Accordingly, I would remand this case for a DuBay2 hearing to determine the providence of this agreement under United States v. Green and United States v. King, both supra.

. Appellant’s case stands in contrast to the recently decided United States v. Dawson, 51 MJ 411 (CMA 1999), where this Court sanctioned the convening authority's agreement with the accused to withdraw a pending charge in a second court-martial in exchange for the accused’s waiver of any complaint concerning post-apprehension confinement in connection with the pending charge and the vacation proceeding in connection with the initial court-martial. That agreement was deemed "collateral to the court-martial and within the command structure.” Id. at 414.

. United States v. DuBay, 17 USCMA 147, 37 CMR 411 (1967).