50 Years of Combined Experience in Military Defense

The attorneys of UCMJ Lawyers are former JAGs who have defended service members in courts-martial and military criminal investigations for more than two decades. If you are facing charges or an investigation under the UCMJ, we handle the full range of serious offenses: Article 120 sexual assault, Article 120b sexual assault of a child, Article 119b child endangerment, Article 128b domestic violence, and CSAM cases including ICAC investigations and digital forensics-heavy prosecutions.

Article 32 preliminary hearings are where courts-martial are won or lost before they start. Many defense attorneys waive them, sometimes because they think probable cause is unbeatable, sometimes because a civilian attorney's biggest fee comes due only after the case is referred to a general court-martial, which is guaranteed to happen if a preliminary hearing is waived. We've argued publicly and in the press that an Article 32 preliminary hearing isn't a probable cause hearing at all. It's a reasonable doubt hearing.

OSTC, the elite prosecution office that handles serious UCMJ cases, tracks its win rate obsessively and would rather drop a weak case than lose at trial. A well-prepared defense can use Article 32 to highlight contradictions and impossibilities in the investigative record, introduce favorable evidence investigators ignored, and give the hearing officer enough reason to doubt the prosecution's odds at trial.Waiver gives all of that up for nothing. We don't waive Article 32 hearings.

We are UCMJ lawyers. Every case we take is a military case, handled by former JAGs who have been inside the system since 2001.