How many Navy JAGs have ever been disbarred?
NMCCA is a rubber stamp to dump punitive discharge cases so CAAF doesn't have to deal with the chaff. I get it, I know why their statistics are what they are. That doesn't change the fact that they are what they are.
Defense appellate "team"? What planet do you live on where E5s get "teams"? There was one lawyer assigned to write the appeal, he spoke to the Sailor one time. He wrote a decent brief, he argued the case well. In fact, when we heard the oral arguments we felt there was a chance the case would be reversed from the questions that were asked. Then the decision came out and referenced the comment by defense counsel in the trial that even the Sailor had never heard (I strongly suspect that the judges on CAAF hadn't seen that comment prior). That was all the appellate attorney could do. The defense lawyers hamstrung him at the trial. Defense lawyers? Yeah, they started preparing for the case a week before the trial. They believed the Sailor was guilty until less than a week before the trial started. They tried to convince the Sailor to take a plea for six months. They didn't care until it was too late. That's why I tell people don't use a Navy defense lawyer. They might advocate for you, they might not. They've got other priorities.
Anyway, you are clearly in the system and won't understand the problems in it. Yes, the story is so outlandish I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't lived it and studied the entire 1500 page record of trial afterwards. I'm not telling you a lot of the details, this was a relatively low profile case that became very high profile afterwards due to precedent that was set by it. It's been citied in national news cases, cases everybody has heard of it, and it set a bad precedent based on a pack of lies. I'm not the only person involved and I'm not the only person who knew the details of the case and what was done wrong in it. There were a number of us. No one cared what we had to say. Remember, we had a chain of command too. We were ordered to do or not do things. The command JAG called me up screaming at me once because I had brought up a rights violation they had committed to the CA.
The judges on CAAF followed what the defense counsel said in the trial. Defense counsel, in the trial, while challenging the foundation of a piece of falsified evidence, told the judge (paraphrasing slightly from memory), "we know the evidence is actually what it appears to be, there's no dispute about that, but we think that it should have a better foundation". The evidence was actually not what it purported to be, and I know this because in order to have gotten the real evidence they would have had to build a time machine. They claimed to have collected data, a week before the trial, remotely, off a device that had been disconnected a year before the trial. How do I know this? I'm the one that pulled the plug on it personally. I went and checked all the serial numbers to see if the device was somehow on the network when they claimed they had this data, because I couldn't believe they'd done this. It wasn't evidence at the time, no one knew an investigation was even in progress because they hadn't told us. Defense counsel was informed of this when this evidence magically appeared right before the trial was about to start.
NCIS took other data and cobbled together something that was false but looked convincing. Years later, I'm now an expert with a Master's degree in the field, and I've run this case by other experts, all of whom have agreed with me. I informed the defense counsel of what had to have happened prior to the start of the trial. They knew the evidence was false and told the court it wasn't.
The reasoning behind this is far more complex than I care to get into here. They got the result they wanted, and nobody cared after that. Many avenues of redress were explored including congressional intervention and no one cared. This played out over two years before the trial and nearly two years after it. The only avenue left was SCOTUS or a presidential pardon.
Why do you think the bar association would care?
There are things I would do differently today. People would go to jail, not be disbarred, if someone tried to do what they did today, or I would be able to prevent it from happening. I naively believed that the system was going to do the right thing. I trusted the Navy, and they failed my Sailor. I know better now. I've prevented at least three courts martial since then with the knowledge I gained from that trial. My command did everything they could to ensure I would never promote again because of my advocacy for the Sailor. This was many years ago, it's not like I can just go back and "file a bar complaint".