Three months after a military appeals court overturned his 20-year sentence for rape, Master Sgt. Michael Silva has been told he’ll face a new trial.

The Air Force said Friday that Silva, a former Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland training instructor, would be tried again on two counts of rape stemming from separate incidents.

That sets up a replay of his trial nearly three years ago at Lackland, when he was sentenced on Jan. 30, 2015 after being found guilty in the rapes of two women — his wife and a recruit he trained two decades ago at Lackland.

“The wing did not prefer ‘new’ charges,” Oscar Balladares, 502nd Air base Wing spokesman, said in an emailed response to questions. “These are the ‘original.’”

No trial date has been set. Silva is now assigned with the 802d Force Support Squadron at Lackland, where commanders will determine his duties. He had been a prisoner at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, but was released Sept. 21 with his rank restored.

He was an airman basic while a prisoner.

The Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals tossed out the convictions last summer, the second reversal of a verdict stemming from a misconduct scandal at Lackland, home of Air Force basic training, which, starting in 2011, saw 35 basic training instructors investigated for assaults and harassment of 69 recruits and technical training students and led to a commander-directed investigation and sweeping changes.

Of the 30 trials conducted over several years, only two other sentences were as harsh as the one given Silva, the son of an Army sergeant major.

Balladares said the wing’s convening authority, Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle, determined that the case merited a new trial.

“She did not make this determination ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ but referred the allegations to a court-martial where that high standard is required for a conviction. At a court-martial, the government will have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt,” he wrote.

A 23-year Air Force veteran, Silva initially was charged with raping three women. In late January 2015, a jury of officers and enlisted personnel convicted Silva, then 44, of raping a recruit twice at Lackland in 1995 and of raping his then-wife — who also had served in the military — in Wyoming in 2007. Prosecutors said he choked them during the assaults.

He was found not guilty of the third charge, involving another woman in North Carolina he had married.

The Air Force alleges that Silva raped the recruit, who it identified as Victim 1, in a car on or about Sept. 1, 1995 and again in a vehicle on Dec. 31 of the same year. The charge sheet also said he raped Victim 1 in a dwelling on the same dates. A third specification states that he raped a woman identified as Victim 2 at or near Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming on Feb. 1, 2007 and again on April 30 of that year.

Silva and his family have long asserted he is innocent. In an appeal of his convictions, the defense contended there were seven elements of trial error, but the appeals court based its decision on just one — the judge's instructions to the jury.

Six women in all testified in the case, including the three who Silva was charged with assaulting. None of them knew each other. At his trial, the military judge, Natalie D. Richardson, told jurors that they could use the testimony of four women “to potentially find (Silva) had a propensity to commit sexual assault,” though they could not convict Silva solely because they believed that he had committed other offenses or had such a propensity, the Court of Criminal Appeals’ ruling stated.

The court cited a decision in United States vs. Hills, a 2016 case brought before a different panel, the Court of Criminal Appeals for the Armed Forces, after Silva's conviction, to decide that the judge undermined Silva's presumption of innocence by allowing the testimony of the four women to support a finding of guilt on other charges.

In conceding that Richardson erred, prosecutors argued it was nonetheless harmless. The appeals court disagreed, stating that the judge's instruction “played directly” into one of the strengths of the prosecution's case: that the women had no connection with each other.

Silva’s defenders, including a well-known military blogger, Tony Carr, have alleged that one key witness recanted her allegation and told several of her friends and family members that she did not believe Silva had raped her. Carr has contended that defense attorneys said “investigators coached witnesses with closed and leading questions in order to concoct the theory that he was a serial offender.”

Balladares responded Friday by noting that Carr appeared to suggest investigator misconduct occurred, but it wasn’t listed among the errors Silva alleged in his appeal. “The military judge, not investigators, are the gatekeepers for what comes in at trial” under federal law.

Balladares said the appeals court did address an issue concerning a witness identified as “JB” initially disclosing to investigators that she was raped and later stating that she did not believe she had been raped.

“At trial, JB explained this statement by testifying that she allowed herself to ‘get confused on what rape really was,’ that she was ‘scared’ and she ‘couldn’t handle it’ at that time,” Balladares wrote, adding that she eventually was medically retired from the Air Force. He said the woman was re-interviewed by Air Force investigators in January 2013 and her allegations became part of the court-martial.

The defense raised other issues, including a claim that Silva couldn’t get sufficient access to one woman’s medical records in order to confront his accuser, but Balladares said the military judge ruled against him in the matter “in whole or in part.”

“At the general court-martial in this case, the defense will have the opportunity to raise these points and argue these issues anew if they so choose,” Balladares said.

Defense attorney Frank Spinner, who represents three military defendants whose convictions could be affected by the ruling in the Hills case but is uninvolved in the Silva case, sees challenges for prosecutors. They will have to prove each specification in Silva’s case and, Spinner said, in the wake of the Hills decision, they will not be allowed to show propensity — the idea that if Silva is guilty of one crime, it is likely he committed another.

But there are other complications, Spinner said, including the difficulty of proving allegations as old as those in Silva’s case. He said it’s also possible the defense has learned of new evidence that could undermine the testimony of Silva’s accusers.

The other factor is that the next trial will be a fresh start, with a new judge or jury.

“It’s what you call rock and roll,” going to court and fighting for an acquittal, said Spinner, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from Colorado Springs, Colorado who has practiced military law since 1977.

sigc@express-news.net