If a court-martial ends in a conviction, the very next call that should be made is to the best military appeals lawyer. The military has one of the most favorable appellate court systems in America. We have helped many dozens of clients with their military appeals with great success.
Military Court-Martial Appeal Lawyer
Military Appeal Process
There are two levels of military appeals. The first level is the appeal court for the specific branch of service that the case was decided in. This first level of courts hears all eligible cases that resulted in convictions in that branch of service. These courts have two duties: 1) to decide whether the evidence actually supports a finding of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; and 2) to determie if there were legal issues with the trial and whether those legal issues are significant enough to result in any relief (such as a new trial).
Katie Cherkasky after arguing at CAAF – 2018
The second level of appeals is the Court of Appeals for the Armed Services (CAAF). CAAF is made up of presidentially appointed civilian judges. These judges consider cases that have highly unique legal issues. CAAF only considers about 35 cases per year. It is rare to have a case be argued and decided before CAAF. The picture to the side shows Katie on the day she argued at CAAF in February 2018.
The final level of appeal is to the Supreme Court. Military cases are rarely heard by the Supreme Court. Of the few that have made it to the Supreme Court, Andrew Cherkasky was the trial defense counsel. Andrew is qualified and admitted to practice before the nation’s highest court.
What Clients Should Expect With a Military Appeal
Military appeals should be an extremely thorough review of the entire case and reduced to a perfectly prepared brief to the appellate court. The appeal attorney needs to go through each page of the transcribed record of the trial and all of the associated documents that were used during the trial. Almost every issue raised to the appellate court must be information that comes out of the actual record of the trial. In the rare case, you can bring new evidence that was not known at the time of trial to the attention of the court.
Military appeals take many months, if not years, from the date of the actual conviction. After the conviction, the Government is required to have the trial transcribed and presented to the convening authority within 120 days. The appeal window truly opens after the transcript is finished and the convening authority acts on the court martial conviction. Prior to that, we set ourselves apart from the military attorney and other civilian attorneys by aggressively working with our clients to understand the issues of their case and conducting any investigative steps that are appropriate under the circumstances.
An effective appeals attorney should be regularly talking to their client during the preparation of the appeal brief. We have close relationships with the various military brigs that help facilitate private attorney-client privileged conversations and secured exchange of documents for our clients appealing while incarcerated.
In addition to direct communications between client and attorney, an appellate attorney spends hundreds of hours reading thousands of pages of the record of trial. After reading everything, probably a few times, it’s time to actually prepare the written brief. Appellate briefs are extremely dense and particular, but must also be extremely persuasive.
Once the brief is filed, the Government will have months to prepare their response to the brief. Then after the Government files their brief, in some instances, it’s appropriate to file a reply brief.
Once both sides have filed all written briefs, there is a chance the case will be scheduled for oral arguments before the multi-judge panel. Only a few cases are argued per year. The lack of oral argument should not be considered negative, and many cases that are overturned did not have oral argument.
Next is the ruling of the Court. The ruling will be published online and will be available to the public immediately. It takes months, sometimes many months, to receive a ruling. The ruling could be short or long and could have a wide variety of outcomes.
Winning a Military Appeal
It takes a special type of attorney to succeed in military appeals. They are a select and limited class of attorney. To be an exceptional military attorney, it requires a background of military service, it takes a history of court-martial experience and expertise, it takes training in federal appellate work, it requires a history of exceptional academic success, it necessitates the highest quality of persuasive writing, and it requires an ferocious appetite to ensure justice, even for those convicted of sometimes heinous crimes.
As the lead of our military appeals, Katie Cherkasky, has all of the qualifications listed above, and so much more. Katie first joined the military through ROTC shortly after 9/11. After commissioning, she attended law school where she graduated first in her law school class. She was an extern clerk for the prestigious 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Katie excelled during her active duty service, conducting dozens of courts-martial before starting civilian defense work at Golden Law. Katie has since handled some of the biggest military appeal cases arguing before CAAF, filing dozens of briefs through the service appellate courts, and receiving outstanding results for clients.
The listing of accomplishments serves a purpose. It takes an incredible set of experiences and talents to excel as a military appellate attorney. The presumption on appeal is that the conviction and sentence will stand. It is only under extremely rare circumstances that an appellate court will realize a lower court made a significant error. It takes exceptional attention to detail to find these issues and bring them before the court.
We’ve had some truly amazing victories over the years. So many of those victories are represented with our victory photos in the courtroom next to our clients. There’s a different type of victory in military courts-martial that don’t get the same lime-light. Military appeals are the last chance for most individuals to have their cases overturned and their rights restored.
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Katie Cherkasky Overturns Conviction of Legendary Marine Colonel
Newsweek and many more national news outlets covered the story of Katie’s incredible victory on behalf of Marine-Corps legend, Colonel Daniel Wilson.
As Newsweek reported:
A Naval appeals court overturned a U.S. Marine officer’s child sex abuse conviction, siding with defense attorneys that the verdict, handed down in late 2017, was “legally and factually insufficient” due to issues with the child victim’s testimony and lack of corroborating eyewitnesses. . .
“Colonel Wilson is relieved and grateful that his innocence has been established through the appellate process,” said Katie Cherkasky, Wilson’s attorney, in an email to Newsweek on Wednesday. “He has maintained faith in the military justice system throughout this extended process and honestly believed that a neutral review of the case by the appellate court would clear his name.” . . .
Andrew Cherkasky added that it’s “extremely rare” to have a U.S. military appeals court overturn a jury verdict and that it only happens every three to four years, comparing it to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series after multiple decades.
