In U.S. v. Warda, decided last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, in an opinion by Judge Tia Johnson, joined by Chief Judge Kevin Ohlson and Judges John Sparks and Liam Hardy, the court reversed defendant's rape conviction:
Appellant and MB met on Facebook in 2012. After communicating over various platforms for a few years, they met in person for the first time in December 2015, when Appellant and his family traveled to MB's home in Amman, Jordan, to ask her family for permission to marry MB. They were married in a Sharia Court in Jordan on December 15, 2015. Afterwards, MB remained in Jordan while Appellant returned to the United States.
In the spring of 2017, Appellant and MB argued over the phone and Appellant orally divorced her by talak, the Islamic term for "divorce." MB testified that after three oral talaks, a divorce is final and cannot be revoked. Appellant's brother AF elaborated:
The way that you execute that divorce is orally, so you just say, "I renounce you." It could be over text message, over the phone, it could be in person, and if you do it three times that's the final divorce. Afterwards, you could [sic] that administrative paperwork, but once you say the word it's an effective divorce.
Appellant revoked the first talak, and in May 2017, MB went to New York to obtain a Green Card. Later that summer, she moved to New York to live with Appellant.
Over the next couple of months, Appellant announced two more talaks. AF testified that when he spoke to MB after the third and final talak in September 2017, MB told him that she wanted citizenship and the dowry she had been promised. AF testified that when he told her he could not deliver either of those things, she replied, "You will see what I am going to do and you will regret it."
In October 2017, MB reported to civilian law enforcement that Appellant had forced her to have sex on more than one occasion, including in August 2017, which is the incident at issue in this case. She sought a temporary protective order against him, and in February 2018, she obtained a long-term protective order. Their divorce was finalized in April 2018. MB's Green Card expired in May 2019, but she remained in the United States. In March 2020, she took a job as an administrative assistant with a nonprofit organization that provides immigration services. By the time she testified in September 2020, she had been living in the United States for three years, where she worked and attended college, and she had made several trips to Jordan to visit her family.
The court concluded that the trial court erred by denying defendant access to MB's immigration records; the records, the court held, were "essential to a fair trial":
