Without a doubt, one of the charges we are seeing more and more often out of the military justice system is strangulation under UCMJ Article 128b. Some would ask us why we would defend service members charged with trying to strangle someone. The answer is simple. Justice in any honest definition of the word presupposes that the accused gets an adequate defense. It is also because, after 20-plus years of defending service members around the globe, we know that many of the recent strangulation charges are absolute bullshit.
Erotic asphyxiation has taken a lot of service members by storm, and we have porn to thank for that. A lot of men do it because porn tells them this is what sex looks like, and a lot of women go along with it because porn tells them they should. What porn does not take into account is a relentless UCMJ and an Office of the Special Trial Counsel system that can destroy the life of a service member the moment an accusation of strangulation is made. More and more service members are facing these charges, and time and again Bilecki is showing up to save them from the abyss.
What to Do When Charged with Strangulation Under the UCMJ
If you were charged with strangulation because you were hiding behind the bushes next to the E-club at night and jumped out and strangled your love interest with your PT shorts, you are in trouble. That is not what we are talking about here, and it is not the reason for the sudden increase in charges under Article 128b.
The more likely scenario is that two service members got drunk and, because they learned everything they know about sex from porn, they engaged in choking during sex. That is all fun and games until the rest of the platoon gives one of them a hard time for hooking up, the relationship goes sideways, or somebody sees an opportunity to flip the narrative. Then one of them says the choking was not consensual, and charges follow.
If you find yourself in the scenario where you are being charged under Article 128b for what you thought was the best night of your life, you need to get ready for a fight. The military justice system is coming to destroy you, and if you do not resist, it will roll over you without so much as acknowledging that you were there.
The first thing you need to do when the investigation starts is procure competent military court-martial defense. We know that sounds self-serving, but your statements can and will be used against you from the start. This is the most serious fight of your life, and your margin for error is small. You do not have to call us, but call someone who has real experience fighting these cases. That is step number one.
Step number two is just as important. Shut up. Do not try to explain it away. Do not assume honesty will save you. Do not think you can “clear it up” with CID, NCIS, OSI, or anyone else. In these cases, the most dangerous statement in the file is often the honest one: “Yeah, but she asked me to choke her.” What you think is context, the government will treat as an admission.
Do not send apology texts. Do not try to smooth it over. Do not try to get the accuser to “help you out.” Do not start deleting messages because you think you are cleaning up a misunderstanding. That is how bad facts become fatal ones.
Step number three is to preserve everything. Do not delete texts. Do not clean up your phone. Do not wipe photos. Do not dump app data. Do not get cute. The messages before and after the encounter, the tone of the relationship, the fantasy talk, the follow-up messages, the silence, the jealousy, the retaliation, all of it matters. In more than one case, the extraction tells a completely different story than the allegation that comes later.
Consensual Behavior Is Not Enough to Exonerate You
For a service member who knows they did nothing wrong, it is very tempting to be overly honest and forthcoming with military investigators. Unfortunately, that usually means admitting the act of choking while insisting it was consensual. We wish that kind of transparency was enough. In the current military climate, it is not.
If the theory is strangulation or suffocation under Article 128b, the government still has to prove more than just a relationship and a loaded accusation. It has to prove the choking happened the way the accuser says it did and that it was done with unlawful force or violence. That is where these cases should be fought. Not with moral panic. Not with buzzwords. With evidence.
The military is still engaged in a campaign to root out sexual misconduct through SHARP and SAPR. The intent behind that effort may be understandable. The execution has been a disaster. OSTC prosecutors are built to prosecute covered offenses aggressively, and command is still more than capable of making a service member’s life hell while the case is pending. If OSTC does not convict, command can still try to bury the service member with a GOMOR, an administrative separation board, a legal hold, stalled schools, derailed PCS moves, and a career frozen in place.
And the damage starts long before trial. A no-contact order may drop immediately. You may get moved to a different barracks, shifted out of your unit area, flagged, put on legal hold, stripped of opportunities, and treated like a convicted man before anybody has proved a thing. That is how these cases work in the real world. The punishment often starts on day one, long before a courtroom ever gets involved.
Under the current climate, if you say it was consensual and the accuser says it was not, the system is primed to act like the accuser is telling the truth. It gets even messier when the accuser admits the sex was consensual but claims the choking was not. In a porn-saturated culture, that distinction is proving disastrous for a lot of service members.
When you are under investigation, seek professional legal help immediately. Do not fall into complacency. Do not fall for the investigator’s trap. This is a big deal.
The Weaponization of Strangulation in the Era of SHARP and SAPR
Chances are that if you are facing such charges today, you never thought you would be here. You and a lot of other service members have found yourselves in this position in the era of SHARP and SAPR. That is because service members have learned how to weaponize allegations of sexual misconduct in an environment where they know any allegation will be treated as presumptively true.
If a lover scorned wants to punish an ex, they know an allegation of sexual misconduct will get traction. If a service member is in their own trouble with the UCMJ, they know an accusation can grind that investigation to a halt or at least shift the focus. It is not right, but it is the reality in the modern military, and it sure as hell is not justice for real victims of sexual misconduct.
We are seeing this time and time again where accusations surface long after the alleged incident occurred. The service member is carrying on with their career and then, out of nowhere, this devastating blast from the past shows up to destroy their life. That is one of the reasons we are quick to defend service members facing these charges. We have seen firsthand just how willing people can be to abuse SHARP and SAPR when they know the system is eager to believe them.
A lover who willingly engaged in erotic asphyxiation can very easily claim strangulation later when they become a lover scorned. That is not a catchy line. That is motive to fabricate, and it is a real defense theory in a real number of cases.
How to Actually Beat the Charge
You do not beat a strangulation charge by hoping the system will be fair. You beat it by forcing the government to prove what it wants to imply.
That means getting into the facts early. It means locking down the phone extraction. It means preserving the messages before and after the alleged encounter. It means finding the photos, the app messages, the deleted communications, the witnesses who saw the relationship, and the timeline that shows when this accusation appeared and why.
It also means testing the medicine. In a lot of these cases, there is no clean corroboration. No photograph. No witness. No contemporaneous complaint. No medical finding that cleanly proves what the government says happened. In other cases, the accuser claims symptoms or injuries that need to be tested by somebody who actually knows what they are talking about. That is why we use digital forensic examiners and qualified medical experts where appropriate. We do not just accept the government’s label and move on.
And make no mistake, the label is doing a lot of work. The government loves the word “strangulation” because it sounds dispositive. It is not. The label is not the proof. In these cases, the accusation usually arrives polished and simplified. The defense has to put the mess back into the facts. The real fight is whether there was choking at all, whether it was asked for, whether it was consensual, whether the allegation changed over time, what the messages show, what the deleted texts show, what the photos show, what the medical evidence shows, and why the allegation surfaced when it did.
Military prosecutors love an easy win. That is what we deny them.
Get Ready to Fight Like Hell or Lose Everything
Namesake and founder Tim Bilecki spent years inside the military justice system as a Senior Defense Counsel for the Army. He will tell you firsthand just how stacked the deck is against the defense. The prosecution gets extraordinary resources, and the defense often has to fight for every inch. The military justice system wants closure, wants convictions, and wants the case cleaned up neatly. If you are the accused, that usually means you are the one being offered up.
You have to be willing to put up an extraordinary fight if you are going to save your career, retirement, or freedom in the era of SHARP, SAPR, and OSTC. Choking may be the latest fetish among a lot of service members, but the timing could not be worse. The current system takes what one side saw as consensual sex and can turn it into a felony-level military prosecution the moment the other side changes the story.
If you are facing charges under Article 128b of the UCMJ, reach out to the team here at Bilecki. We will shoot you straight on exactly what you are facing and give you a free defense strategy session. This is true even if you did make a mistake and, as an NCO, you spent illicit time with a junior service member. You may have been wrong. You may still be in trouble. But that does not mean you committed a felony-level strangulation offense under Article 128b. If the choking was consensual, you are going to have to fight to force the government to confront that truth.
Do not let them take everything from you. Fight back. Most importantly, get Bilecki into that fight on your behalf.
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