Fort Riley covers more than 100,000 acres of rolling tallgrass prairie in north-central Kansas, between Kansas City and Wichita. The post is home to the 1st Infantry Division, the “Big Red One,” one of the Army’s most-deployed mechanized divisions. The terrain is open, with steep ridges and river valleys cut by the Kansas and Republican Rivers. Summers are hot. Winters are cold and windy. Spring brings severe weather.
The 1st ID deployed repeatedly to Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. Soldiers here train for mechanized warfare: combined operations using infantry, armor, artillery, and aviation. The mission is decisive action against conventional forces. The division exists to deploy rapidly and fight large-scale ground combat.
Manhattan is a few miles from the main gate. It’s a college town built around Kansas State University, with off-post housing, bars, restaurants, and the usual trouble that follows soldiers on weekends. Junction City borders the installation and depends almost entirely on the military economy. Kansas City is two hours east. The post is connected to Interstate 70, which runs straight through Kansas from Missouri to Colorado.
Fort Riley generates serious criminal cases. In February 2025, a soldier was arrested for murder in Junction City after a shooting with an alleged romantic connection. In September 2024, a soldier was charged with involuntary manslaughter after a DUI car crash that killed a Kansas police officer. In September 2025, a former Fort Riley soldier was convicted by jury of rape and two counts of aggravated sexual battery in Riley County District Court. In November 2024, four soldiers from Fort Riley were arrested for aggravated battery over a weekend in Manhattan.
These cases reflect the severity of criminal conduct that commands here deal with constantly: murder, manslaughter, sexual assault, domestic violence, and off-post incidents that draw state prosecution. Soldiers under investigation face exposure in multiple court systems: military, state, and sometimes federal. CID, local law enforcement, and prosecutors coordinate. Charges can be filed in any system or in more than one simultaneously.
We’ve worked cases at Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth for more than twenty years. The two posts are 90 miles apart and fall within the same federal judicial district. We’ve handled everything from standard courts-martial to a mutiny trial out of Leavenworth. We have personal connections to Kansas City and Atchison. We spend significant time in the region: Fort Riley, Fort Leavenworth, McConnell Air Force Base, Offutt Air Force Base, Fort Leonard Wood. We know the route, the installations, and the commands. This isn’t a region we visit occasionally. It’s part of our regular practice.
Why Soldiers Need Civilian Counsel Before Charges Are Filed
Trial Defense Service attorneys aren’t assigned until charges are preferred or an Article 15 is offered. Until then, most soldiers get one instruction: invoke your rights and wait. That’s sound advice, but it leaves a gap.
TDS offices are overwhelmed. Walk-in appointments, mandatory PT, command briefings, and administrative requirements consume time that could be spent on early case development. The system isn’t designed for proactive defense. It’s designed to assign counsel once the government commits to making it a case.
The problem is what happens during the investigation. CID is building its case. Investigators are taking statements, seizing evidence, interviewing witnesses. The prosecution is guiding the investigation. Meanwhile, the soldier has no one communicating with investigators, no one advocating to command, no one identifying exculpatory evidence, and no one presenting that evidence to the people making decisions.
The soldier also has no one answering questions, no one explaining what’s happening, no one addressing their anxieties, no one talking to family, no one providing updates. On one side: confusion, ambiguity, scandal, and dread. On the other side: the government is actively building a case.
Civilian counsel neutralizes that. We engage during the investigation. We communicate with CID, command, and OSTC. We identify favorable evidence and present it to the people who decide whether to prefer charges. We answer the soldier’s questions, explain the process, and provide regular updates. We talk to family members who need to understand what’s happening. We restore balance when the government has all the momentum and the soldier has none.
TDS attorneys are competent and dedicated, but they’re working within a system that limits when and how they can act. We’re not. When a soldier calls us during an investigation, we start working immediately. No waiting for an assignment. No waiting for charges. And no more sitting alone with the weight of an investigation you don’t understand while the government builds its case unopposed.
Q: Pranks can be registrable sex offenses?
Physical pranks, hazing rituals, and crude jokes involving contact can result in criminal charges under the UCMJ. An Air Force training instructor ordered trainees to apply heat-based muscle rub to their genitals as punishment. No sexual motive was alleged, but the contact and humiliation were enough. A panel convicted him under Article 120, triggering mandatory sex offender registration. He received no confinement, but his career ended immediately.
Conduct like groin strikes, wedgies, or physical contact involving the buttocks gets prosecuted as assault. When the government proves intent to humiliate or dominate, the charge escalates to sexual contact. “It was just a joke” isn’t a defense. The law doesn’t ask whether you thought it was funny. It asks whether you made unwanted physical contact with another person’s body.
Barracks humor that crosses into physical contact can result in conviction and lifetime registration as a sex offender. It’s not ambiguous. It’s a prosecutable offense.
Q: What happens if the government can’t prove intent?
The case doesn’t end. If prosecutors can’t prove sexual motive or intent to humiliate beyond a reasonable doubt, the same conduct usually satisfies the elements of simple assault under Article 128. Assault doesn’t require sexual intent. It requires unlawful touching that causes offense or harm. A slap, shove, or groin strike in the barracks might not qualify as a sex crime, but it’s still assault under the UCMJ.
Article 120: Memory Isn’t Truth
Memory doesn’t record. It rebuilds. The brain pulls fragments together, adds emotion, borrows from what others say. When a story changes, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone is lying. It might, or it could mean memory is doing what memory does: filling gaps, smoothing rough edges, making sense of confusion.
Friends, investigators, news reports: they can all contribute details that feel real but weren’t there originally. These additions accumulate. An uncertain recollection becomes vivid certainty. The accuser believes it. That’s what makes it dangerous.
The Brain: Gap-Filling Machine
The brain hates blank spaces. When memory has gaps, the mind invents details to close them. This isn’t lying. It’s the brain completing a story so it makes sense. The invented story also protects self-image. It resolves psychological stress by creating a version of events that fits how the person sees themselves. Alcohol and trauma amplify the effect.
The person confabulating believes what they’re saying. Their certainty sounds real because to them it is real. Their emotion is genuine. Their tone doesn’t waver. The story makes them whole again, even if it never happened. That’s why confabulated testimony convinces juries even when the facts don’t support it.
Blackouts Big and Small
A blackout isn’t passing out. During a blackout, the person is awake, talking, moving. The brain just stops recording. There are two types of blackout: en bloc blackouts where nothing gets stored, and fragmentary blackouts where only pieces survive.
Those fragments are unstable. When the brain tries to rebuild the missing hours, it guesses. It borrows from what other people say happened. The guesses feel like memories. They aren’t.
How Belief Becomes Memory
After a blackout or a confusing encounter, distress and uncertainty trigger cognitive distortions. Confirmation bias focuses attention on anything that supports the assault narrative while discarding contradictory details. Hindsight bias reframes ambiguous moments as warning signs that should have been recognized.
These aren’t choices. They’re automatic psychological processes. The result: an honest but inaccurate belief. The accuser isn’t lying. They’re remembering something that didn’t happen the way they now believe it did.
So now what? We Need Expert Testimony on Memory and Intoxication
Memory science is counterintuitive. Juries don’t know that blackouts and confabulation create sincere but inaccurate testimony. They assume certainty equals truth. Without expert testimony, the panel has no framework to separate genuine belief from reliable memory.
A forensic psychologist doesn’t testify about whether the assault occurred. That’s the panel’s decision. The expert explains how memory works and why a witness can be entirely sincere and entirely wrong.
What the expert does:
- Educates the panel on reliability versus credibility. A witness can be honest, emotional, and consistent while recounting events that never happened. Sincerity doesn’t prove accuracy.
- Explains cognitive phenomena. Memory reconsolidation, suggestion, and confabulation create genuinely believed but false details. The expert shows the panel how this happens and why it’s common in cases involving alcohol and trauma.
- Analyzes alcohol’s impact on memory formation. Blackouts (en bloc and fragmented) occur when alcohol disrupts hippocampal function. The brain stops recording. The expert explains why gaps exist and why attempts to fill those gaps produce unreliable testimony about critical moments—like the moment consent was or wasn’t given.
- Provides a scientific framework. The panel gets the tools to evaluate testimony independent of the witness’s emotional presentation. Tears, certainty, and composure become less influential when the panel understands that those qualities don’t correlate with memory accuracy.
In UCMJ sexual assault cases, testimony is often the only evidence. Ignoring the science of memory and intoxication risks convicting someone based on belief rather than fact. Expert analysis ensures the verdict rests on the reliability of the recollection, not just the sincerity of the witness. The good news is that in the military justice system, the defense usually gets an expert in a case like this for free.
Defending Soldiers Who Were Cast Aside
This practice launched in 2006, at the center of sustained combat operations across Iraq and Afghanistan. Many soldiers we represented had completed deployments or been sent home before finishing them, now facing allegations that made them unable to redeploy. The moment an investigation started, these soldiers became liabilities. They couldn’t fill deployment slots. Commands needed bodies downrange, not soldiers tied up in pending cases.
So commands rushed to get rid of them. Allegations were treated as fact. Whether the conduct actually occurred didn’t matter as much as clearing the slot for someone deployable. Cases got pushed to prosecutors who pushed them forward hastily because that’s what commands wanted: resolution, not justice.
We had to tell panels what these soldiers accomplished in combat because prosecutors wouldn’t. Our clients pulled wounded soldiers from burning vehicles, held positions alone during firefights, dragged bodies through crossfires. Commands didn’t bring any of that up during prosecution. If it came up at sentencing, prosecutors, many of whom had never seen combat, inverted it: if you had discipline under fire, you must have had control during the alleged misconduct. Your valor proves you knew right from wrong, which proves guilt.
The rush to judgment meant weak cases went to trial. Allegations that should have been investigated thoroughly got rubber-stamped. Soldiers became disposable the moment they couldn’t deploy, and combat records that should have created pause instead became weapons against them.
We are not combat veterans. We were judge advocates in the Air Force, serving from 2001 through 2005 during the early years of the wars. We don’t claim firsthand knowledge of what soldiers endure downrange. Much of what we learned came from representing hundreds of Soldiers and Marines who saw a lot of combat.
Few defense attorneys, and none currently in uniform, were handling these cases the way they needed to be handled during the height of the wars. If large-scale conflict returns, as it likely will, the military justice system will need civilian counsel who understand how war alters every variable: how investigations are conducted, how commands prioritize cases, and how actions taken in theater are later dissected, inverted, and criminalized in a courtroom.
Q: Why don’t I see fees listed on other websites?
They hide fees because posting them means losing control of the conversation. If you see the number before you call, you might leave for a cheaper option. They want you on the phone first, where they can assess how desperate you are, what you earn, and how much pressure you’re under before money comes up.
Q: When I call those firms, what happens during that call?
The call isn’t just about your case. It’s about measuring you. They’re figuring out your rank, time in service, whether you have dependents, how worried you sound, and how much financial strain you can tolerate. The pricing conversation gets delayed deliberately. Once you’ve explained your situation and started to trust them, they have the ammunition they need to make their fee sound more reasonable.
Here’s how it works:
They calculate everything you stand to lose. Base pay, housing allowance, medical coverage, dental, vision, tax advantages, life insurance, professional military education credits. They throw in clothing allowance, commissary savings, even access to the shoppette. By the end, they’ve built a total that sounds like hundreds of thousands of dollars, and well over a million when they calculate future earnings and your retirement. They come up with a dramatic number. And then they name their fee. And just in case you can’t tell, they explain: Compared to losing all that, their fee doesn’t sound so bad. You’re actually saving money by giving it to them. The math works because the fear is real.
Q: Are they lying?
No. The math also works because it’s essentially true. A lawyer defending against career loss, retirement forfeiture, or confinement isn’t selling fiction. The risk calculation is legitimate once you understand what you’re protecting. The problem isn’t the fee itself, it’s the performance required to get you comfortable with it. It’s condescending, undignified, and a great way to sabotage the relationship before it begins.
Q: Why not just post the price?
Hourly firms hide rates because they can’t predict final costs, and transparency would expose how quickly bills escalate.
Flat-fee firms hide pricing too. They do it to preserve flexibility. If they post one number, they can’t charge different clients different amounts for similar cases. Publishing fees removes negotiating room and invites competitors to undercut them.
Q: Why does UCMJ Lawyers publish fees when other firms don’t?
We’d rather spend consultation time on your case than on price negotiations. When someone calls and the fee is beyond what they can pay, the conversation dies. Publishing fees up front filters out mismatches before anyone wastes time. It’s efficient and honest for both sides.
Q: Do you calculate what a client stands to lose before quoting a price?
No. We know it and you know it. What you’re protecting isn’t our selling point. In more than twenty years, we’ve never tallied up someone’s pay, benefits, and retirement to manufacture urgency. Treating that knowledge like a sales tactic (pretending to help you “discover” what you already know) is manipulative and pathetic.
Q: Ok, so what are your fees?
Our standard fees:
- Initial/investigative stage: $6,500
- Article 32 preliminary hearing: $10,000–$12,000
- General court-martial trial: $25,000
- Administrative separation board: $15,000–$20,000
The fee covers the work. Travel expenses (flights, lodging, car rental) are billed separately and disclosed before you sign anything.
Market rates based on what we see:
- Initial/investigative stage: $4,500 to $8,000
- Article 32 preliminary hearing: $8,000 to $20,000
- General court-martial trial: $15,000 to over $100,000
- Administrative separation board: $12,000 to $50,000
Beware of the fine print with trial fees:
Some firms cap the number of days their trial fee covers. If the trial runs longer, they bill thousands per day beyond that limit. Some firms define a trial “day” as eight hours and charge hourly rates for any time after that. Some firms exclude travel days from their trial fee and bill those separately.
Our trial fee covers everything: all work, all time on-site, all travel time. If the trial runs long, there’s no additional charge. The fee is set before the trial starts and doesn’t change.
Free Case Review for Fort Riley Service Members
If you are stationed at Fort Riley and facing investigation, court-martial, or administrative action under the UCMJ, call us at 800-319-3134 for a confidential case review. We have defended service members at Fort Riley, Fort Leavenworth, McConnell Air Force Base, Offutt Air Force Base, and Fort Leonard Wood for more than twenty years. We represented soldiers throughout the Global War on Terror and continue to handle the kinds of cases OSTC prosecutes today: sexual assault, domestic violence, child exploitation, murder, and manslaughter. We know the region, the commands, and the charges.