2015 (September Term)
United States v. Sterling, 75 M.J. 407 (a lawful order must relate to military duty, which includes all activities reasonably necessary to accomplish a military mission, or safeguard or promote the morale, discipline, and usefulness of members of a command and directly connected with the maintenance of good order in the service).
(the dictates of a person’s conscience, religion, or personal philosophy cannot justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order).
(an order is presumed to be lawful, and the accused bears the burden of rebutting the presumption).
(to be lawful, an order must (1) have a valid military purpose, and (2) be clear, specific, and narrowly drawn; in addition, the order must not conflict with the statutory or constitutional rights of the person receiving the order).
(a staff sergeant’s order that appellant remove signs posting the words “no weapon formed against me shall prosper” from her shared workspace served a valid military purpose by maintaining good order and discipline, and was thus lawful, where staff sergeant wished to keep the shared workspace clean and did not like the tone of the posted signs, which could have been interpreted as combative).
(while appellant’s posting of signs at her workspace, which stated that “no weapon formed against me shall prosper,” was claimed to be religiously motivated at least in part and thus fell within the RFRA’s expansive definition of “religious exercise,” appellant nonetheless failed to identify the sincerely held religious belief that made placing the signs important to her exercise of religion or how the removal of the signs substantially burdened her exercise of religion in some other way, and thus appellant was not entitled to the RFRA defense at her court-martial proceedings for violating the order to remove the signs).
2008 (September Term)
United
States v. Ranney, 67 M.J. 297 (Article 91,
UCMJ, like Article 90, UCMJ,
makes punishable disobedience only of lawful commands).
(an order is presumed to be
lawful, and the
accused bears the burden of rebutting the presumption; nevertheless, an
order
purporting to regulate personal affairs is not lawful unless it has a
military
purpose).