Military Lawyers

Travel voucher problems are a common source of trouble for people who hold security clearances, because vouchers combine money and the duty to be truthful. When a service member or employee is accused of submitting false or inflated travel claims, a clearance review can follow. A frequent question is whether that kind of alleged dishonesty falls under Guideline F, the financial considerations guideline. The accurate answer is that voucher dishonesty can raise a clearance concern, but the guideline that most squarely fits dishonesty is Guideline E, personal conduct, while Guideline F may also apply depending on the financial dimension of the conduct. Both can be involved, and understanding which guideline does what is important for an effective response.

What Guideline F actually covers

Guideline F, financial considerations, addresses concerns that arise from a person’s financial situation and financial behavior. The core worry is that someone who is financially overextended, irresponsible, or who has unexplained affluence may be at greater risk of unreliable or untrustworthy behavior, including the temptation to generate funds through illegal acts. Guideline F focuses on issues such as significant unpaid debt, a history of not meeting financial obligations, and financial problems linked to gambling or other conduct.

Dishonesty in a travel voucher can intersect with Guideline F when the conduct is financial in nature, for example where a member files inflated claims to obtain money they were not entitled to. Adjudicators may view that as evidence of financial wrongdoing or of generating income through deceptive means. So Guideline F is not irrelevant to voucher dishonesty, but it is not the most natural home for the dishonesty itself.

Why dishonesty fits Guideline E more directly

Guideline E, personal conduct, is the guideline that addresses dishonesty, lack of candor, and rule-breaking behavior. It treats deliberate falsification and untruthfulness as raising doubt about a person’s reliability, trustworthiness, and willingness to comply with rules and regulations, which is the very judgment at the center of a clearance decision. Submitting a knowingly false travel voucher is, at its heart, an act of dishonesty toward the government, and that is precisely the kind of conduct Guideline E is designed to capture.

In practice, when alleged voucher dishonesty leads to a clearance action, the Statement of Reasons may cite Guideline E for the dishonesty, and may also cite Guideline F if the conduct involved improper financial gain. Guidelines frequently overlap, and a single course …

Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice punishes failure to obey lawful orders and regulations. A recurring question is whether a series of small violations, each of a regulation that on its own carries no criminal penalty, can be stacked together to support a single prosecutable Article 92 charge. The short answer is that adding up minor breaches of non-punitive regulations does not transform them into a punishable offense. The character of the underlying regulation, not the number of times it was breached, controls.

The Difference Between Punitive and Non-Punitive Regulations

Article 92’s first two theories require either a lawful general order or regulation, or another lawful order issued by someone with authority to issue it. A key feature of military regulations is that not all of them are punitive. A regulation is punitive only if it is properly issued by competent authority and contains language making a violation enforceable through criminal sanction. Many regulations are guidance, administrative, or aspirational. These non-punitive provisions establish standards and expectations but are enforced through counseling, evaluations, or administrative measures rather than court-martial.

When a regulation is non-punitive, a violation of it cannot by itself be charged under the general order theory of Article 92. The Manual for Courts-Martial recognizes that not every regulation creates criminal liability, and a provision that lacks punitive force does not supply the lawful general order that the offense requires.

Why Stacking Does Not Create a Crime

The cumulative theory assumes that several non-criminal acts can sum to a criminal one. Military law does not work that way for this purpose. If a single violation of a non-punitive regulation is not punishable under Article 92, then ten violations of the same kind are ten non-punishable acts. There is no provision that converts a quantity of administratively enforceable lapses into a court-martial offense. Each specification must independently allege the violation of a regulation that is itself enforceable as a punitive matter. A charging document that aggregates minor breaches of non-punitive rules is vulnerable to a motion attacking it for failing to state an offense.

Where Article 92 Liability Can Legitimately Arise

This does not mean repeated lapses are always beyond Article 92’s reach. There are three avenues to consider. First, if even one of the regulations at issue is in fact punitive, a violation of that specific provision can be charged on its own terms, and the lawfulness …

The escape offense that service members and practitioners have long associated with Article 95 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice is the prohibition on resistance, flight, breach of arrest, and escape. It is worth noting at the outset that the Military Justice Act of 2016 renumbered that offense, which now appears at Article 87a, codified at 10 U.S.C. 887a, while Article 95 in its current form addresses offenses by a sentinel or lookout. The substance of the escape prohibition is unchanged. The real question posed here is jurisdictional: when a member flees confinement while stationed or held on foreign soil, is the military’s escape statute the only law in play, or can the host nation’s law also apply?

The Military Offense Applies Worldwide

The first point is that the military escape offense follows the service member wherever they are. Members subject to the code are subject to it around the clock and around the globe, so fleeing from confinement on foreign territory is an escape under the military statute just as it would be on a domestic installation. The location does not change the elements. The government must still prove that the accused was placed in confinement by competent authority and freed themselves before release by proper authority. Being overseas does not remove the conduct from the reach of military justice.

But Military Jurisdiction Is Not Necessarily Exclusive

The harder question is whether the host nation can also assert jurisdiction over the same conduct, and the answer is that it often can. When forces are stationed abroad, the relationship between United States military authority and the host country’s legal system is usually governed by a status of forces agreement. These agreements allocate jurisdiction between the sending state, here the United States, and the receiving state, the host nation. They do not erase host-nation law; they manage how and when it applies to members of the visiting force.

Under the framework used in the NATO Status of Forces Agreement, which is a widely cited model, jurisdiction can be exclusive to one party or concurrent. Exclusive jurisdiction exists where the conduct is punishable under the law of only one of the two states. Where the conduct is punishable under both, jurisdiction is concurrent, and the agreement sets out which state has the primary right to exercise it. The sending state generally has the primary right over offenses arising from official duty …

Apprehensions rarely unfold calmly. They often happen at night, in crowded spaces, after alcohol has been involved, or in the middle of a charged confrontation. Multiple people may be shouting instructions at once. A service member caught in that environment may genuinely not know what is being asked of them or who has the authority to ask. When a resistance charge follows, the central question becomes how the law treats that confusion. The answer is that confusion and conflicting orders are not excuses in themselves, but they bear directly on the mental element the government must prove, and they can defeat a charge when they negate it.

The article number, briefly

Resistance, flight, breach of arrest, and escape were prosecuted under Article 95 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice until the Military Justice Act of 2016 renumbered them to Article 87a (10 U.S.C. 887a), effective January 1, 2019. Current Article 95 (10 U.S.C. 895) addresses offenses by a sentinel or lookout. The Article 95 label persists in common usage, so this article uses it while analyzing the current statute.

The mental element is where confusion does its work

Resisting apprehension is not a strict liability offense. The government must prove that the apprehension was lawful, that the person making it was authorized, that the accused knew or reasonably should have known of that authority, and that the accused’s resistance was a voluntary, intentional act. Confusion enters the analysis through these elements, especially knowledge and willfulness.

If a service member does not understand that they are being apprehended, or does not understand that the person directing them has authority, the knowledge element weakens. If the service member’s physical reaction was not a deliberate choice to resist but an instinctive or panicked response to a chaotic scene, the willfulness element weakens. Confusion is therefore not a freestanding defense that excuses otherwise clear misconduct. It is evidence that goes to whether the accused had the culpable mental state the offense requires.

Conflicting orders and the reasonable service member

When multiple people issue contradictory instructions, the law asks what a reasonable service member would have understood and done in that moment. If one authority figure says stop and another says move, and the accused complies with one while appearing to defy the other, the apparent resistance may be the product of an impossible situation rather than a choice to defy lawful authority.

This …

A Board of Inquiry, often called a BOI, is the elimination proceeding that can end a commissioned officer’s career. When allegations arise out of a deployment, whether they involve misconduct downrange, decisions made under operational pressure, or conduct reported after redeployment, an officer may face a show-cause action that puts retention and characterization of service at stake. Officers in that situation understandably want to know what legal criteria must be satisfied before a BOI can be initiated. The answer is that initiation requires a recognized statutory or regulatory basis for elimination, proper authority to refer the case, and adherence to the notice and procedural requirements that protect the officer’s rights. Deployment-related allegations are evaluated under those same criteria; the deployment context does not change the legal framework, although it can affect the facts and the available defenses.

A recognized basis for elimination

The threshold criterion is that the allegations must fall within one of the authorized grounds for officer elimination. Under the governing service regulation, such as Army Regulation 600-8-24 for Army officers and the parallel regulations of the other services, an officer may be required to show cause for retention based on substandard performance of duty, misconduct, or moral or professional dereliction, as well as other recognized bases such as conduct in the interest of national security or the presence of certain derogatory information in the official record. Derogatory information that can trigger or support elimination includes UCMJ violations, criminal convictions, security clearance revocation, relief for cause, and letters of reprimand, among others.

For deployment-related allegations, the initiating authority must be able to articulate how the conduct fits one of these grounds. An allegation of misconduct during a deployment, a substantiated investigation finding, or derogatory information placed in the record as a result of deployment events can each supply the required basis. The key legal point is that the allegations must map onto an authorized ground, not merely reflect general dissatisfaction with the officer’s performance.

Proper authority and a sufficient evidentiary predicate

A BOI cannot be self-starting. The decision to require an officer to show cause must be made by the official with authority to do so under the applicable regulation, and that decision must rest on an adequate factual predicate. In practice, deployment-related allegations are usually developed through a command investigation, an inspector general inquiry, a law enforcement investigation, or substantiated findings that are then referred up the …

A veteran whose discharge upgrade request was denied is not necessarily at the end of the road, especially when new evidence comes to light. One of the most common forms of new evidence is a psychological evaluation that was not part of the original record, often diagnosing a condition such as post-traumatic stress disorder that may explain the conduct that led to the discharge. The way the review system treats a denied request that is renewed with such an evaluation depends on which board denied it, what avenue the veteran pursues next, and a body of Department of Defense guidance that instructs boards to give these mental health claims special weight.

The two boards and what denial means

There are two principal forums for changing a discharge. The Discharge Review Board (DRB) reviews the characterization and reason for a discharge, generally for discharges that are not more than fifteen years old, and it cannot review discharges resulting from a general court-martial. Applications to the DRB are made on DD Form 293. The Board for Correction of Military Records (the correction board for each service, the Air Force and Navy use related names) has broader authority, can reach older cases and certain court-martial-related discharges, and is the avenue when the DRB lacks jurisdiction or has already denied relief. Applications to the correction board are made on DD Form 149.

A denial from either board is not automatically final. Both systems allow a path forward when the veteran brings forward new evidence, and a psychological evaluation that was never before the board is the classic example.

Reconsideration on new and material evidence

The first concept that governs a renewed request is reconsideration based on new and material evidence. When a board has denied relief, the veteran can ask it to reconsider if there is evidence that was not previously presented and that could reasonably change the result. A newly obtained psychological evaluation usually fits this description: it did not exist in the prior record, and it speaks directly to whether a mental health condition contributed to the conduct underlying the discharge.

The “new and material” framing matters. The evaluation must genuinely be new, not merely a restatement of arguments already made, and it must be material, meaning it bears on the actual basis for the denial. An evaluation that diagnoses a condition and links it to the in-service conduct or to the …

Medical fitness findings can change the entire trajectory of a military career. When a condition leads to a finding that a member is unfit for continued service, that finding may result in a medical separation or medical retirement, and in some situations it becomes intertwined with an adverse discharge action. Service members frequently ask whether they can challenge those findings, especially when the findings are being used to support a separation they believe is unwarranted or unfair. The answer is yes. The military’s disability evaluation system is built around the right to review and contest medical fitness determinations, and members have layered opportunities to object before any finding becomes final.

How fitness findings are made

Fitness for duty is evaluated through the Disability Evaluation System, which begins with the Medical Evaluation Board (MEB) and continues to the Physical Evaluation Board (PEB). The MEB documents a member’s medical conditions and prepares a narrative summary, then makes recommendations. Importantly, the MEB does not make the final fitness determination or assign disability ratings. It either concludes that conditions are not unfitting, allowing a return to duty, or refers the matter to the PEB for a fitness determination. The PEB then decides whether a condition renders the member unfit to perform the duties of their office, grade, rank, or rating, and addresses disability ratings.

Because these boards generate the medical findings that can support a separation, the procedural rights attached to them are the member’s primary tools for objecting.

The right to review and rebut

A member has the right to review the MEB’s findings and the narrative summary before the matter advances. If the member disagrees, the member may submit a written rebuttal, commonly called a non-concurrence. That rebuttal can include additional medical evidence, opinions from other providers, and a personal statement explaining why the findings are inaccurate or incomplete. This rebuttal right is the first formal opportunity to object, and it is significant because correcting an erroneous narrative summary at the MEB stage can prevent a flawed finding from carrying forward.

At the PEB stage, the member again has the right to disagree with the findings. An informal PEB issues an initial determination, and a member dissatisfied with that determination can appeal by requesting a formal PEB hearing. The formal board is not bound by the informal board’s determination, so the member gets a genuine opportunity for a fresh decision, the right …

When a service member faces an administrative separation board or board of inquiry, the proceeding is not only about whether the alleged basis for separation is true. It is also about whether the member should be retained despite that basis and, if separated, what characterization of service is warranted. Mitigation evidence speaks to those questions, and recognition the member earned in an off-duty or volunteer capacity is a familiar category of mitigation. The weight it carries is real but situational, and understanding how boards use it requires understanding what the board is actually deciding.

What an Administrative Separation Board Decides

An administrative separation board, including an officer board of inquiry, generally answers a sequence of questions. First, did the conduct or condition alleged as the basis for separation occur or exist. Second, if so, does it warrant separation. Third, if separation is warranted, what should the characterization of service be. Mitigation evidence is most relevant to the second and third questions. Even when a board finds that the alleged basis is established, it retains discretion to recommend retention, and it shapes the characterization recommendation. This is the space in which commendations and other favorable evidence operate.

Because the board is weighing the whole person, the rules of evidence are relaxed compared with a court-martial, and the member is generally permitted to present a broad range of favorable material. Awards, letters of appreciation, and recognition of service to the community are commonly admitted as part of that whole-person presentation.

How Off-Duty Recognition Functions as Mitigation

Off-duty commendations, such as recognition for volunteer work, community service, or contributions made outside the member’s official duties, can support several mitigation themes. They can show good character, reflecting the kind of person the member is when not performing assigned tasks. They can show rehabilitative potential, suggesting that the member is capable of positive conduct and continued valuable service. They can also help rebut an inference that the member’s misconduct or deficiency reflects a settled disposition rather than an aberration.

The persuasive force of this evidence depends on how closely it connects to the issues the board must resolve. Recognition that demonstrates leadership, reliability, integrity, or sustained commitment tends to carry more weight, because those qualities bear directly on the member’s value to the service and on the likelihood that the underlying problem will recur. Recognition that is generic or unrelated to any trait at issue …

Breach of arrest is one of the offenses that was historically charged under Article 95 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and that now appears at Article 87a, codified at 10 U.S.C. 887a, following the renumbering that took effect with the Military Justice Act of 2016. Proving the offense is not simply a matter of showing that a service member went somewhere. The government must establish a specific legal status, the limits attached to it, and a knowing departure from those limits. Each of those elements points to particular kinds of documents and testimony.

What the Offense Actually Requires

To prove breach of arrest, the government must show that a competent authority placed the accused in arrest, that the accused knew of the arrest and its limits, and that the accused went beyond those limits before being released by proper authority. “Arrest” here is a moral restraint imposed by an order directing a person to remain within certain specified limits, not physical confinement. Because the offense centers on an order, on the accused’s awareness of it, and on a departure from defined boundaries, the proof tends to fall into three buckets: documents establishing the arrest order and its terms, evidence of the accused’s knowledge, and evidence of the actual departure.

Documentation Establishing the Arrest and Its Limits

The starting point is proof that arrest was lawfully imposed by someone with authority to impose it. This is commonly shown through written records of the restraint. Depending on the service and the situation, that can include a written notice or memorandum imposing arrest, an entry in a unit log or blotter, a restriction or arrest order signed by the commander, or similar official paperwork that identifies who imposed the restraint and what limits were set. These documents matter for two reasons. They show that a competent authority acted, and they fix the precise geographic or situational boundaries the accused was required to observe, which is essential because the government must later prove the accused exceeded those exact limits.

Records that establish the chain of authority can also be important. Evidence that the person who imposed the arrest was a commander or other official with the power to do so helps satisfy the requirement that the restraint was imposed by competent authority. Where the limits were communicated in writing, that writing is often the cleanest proof of their content.

Evidence of the

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Escape offenses sit at the intersection of two ideas that the military justice system treats with great care: the physical act of leaving custody, and the mental state of the person who left. The question of mens rea, the so called guilty mind, is what separates a punishable escape from an innocent misunderstanding. Understanding that mental element is often the difference between a conviction and an acquittal.

A note on numbering matters before going further. The offenses of resistance, flight, breach of arrest, and escape were historically prosecuted under Article 95 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Military Justice Act of 2016, which took effect on January 1, 2019, renumbered these offenses to Article 87a (codified at 10 U.S.C. 887a). Current Article 95 (10 U.S.C. 895) now addresses offenses by a sentinel or lookout. Many service members, command teams, and even older reference materials still refer to escape under the familiar Article 95 label, so this article uses that framing while pointing to the current statute.

What mens rea means in this context

Mens rea is a Latin phrase that translates roughly to guilty mind. In criminal law it describes the mental state a person must have when committing the prohibited act. Not every offense requires the same mental state. Some require intent, some require knowledge, some require recklessness, and a small number are strict liability offenses that require no proven mental state at all. Escape offenses are not strict liability offenses. They demand proof that the accused acted with a culpable state of mind.

The statute itself frames the prohibited conduct in terms of acting willfully. For escape from custody or confinement, the government must show that the departure was a voluntary, intentional act rather than an accident, a mistake, or the product of circumstances beyond the person’s control. This willfulness requirement is the heart of the mens rea analysis.

Why willfulness is the controlling mental state

Willfulness in this setting means the service member acted on purpose. A person who walks away from a guard knowing they are in custody and intending to leave has the requisite mental state. A person who is released by what they reasonably believe to be proper authority, or who is physically removed from a confinement area by someone else, generally lacks it.

This matters because custody situations are frequently chaotic and ambiguous. A service member may not realize that informal …