Military Courts-Martial

A court-martial is a federal criminal trial run inside the military justice system, and it operates on rules that overlap only partly with civilian criminal practice. There are three tiers (Summary, Special, and General), with escalating jurisdiction and consequences ranging from reduction in rank at a Summary Court-Martial to a Dishonorable Discharge, decades in confinement, or, in a capital General Court-Martial, death. Everything runs on the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Manual for Courts-Martial: unique punitive articles, distinct rules of evidence, and procedural rules unfamiliar to most civilian practitioners. A commander decides whether to refer charges (or, for covered offenses, an independent Office of Special Trial Counsel prosecutor does), which panel members sit, and how the case is packaged for trial. Panels of officers, or mixed officer-enlisted members, return verdicts under a three-quarters concurrence rule; military judges impose sentence in non-capital cases under bifurcated proceedings. Appeals run first to the service Court of Criminal Appeals, then to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and, in rare cases, to the U.S. Supreme Court. A conviction carries a federal criminal record, potential punitive discharge, and collateral consequences that follow the client into civilian life.

We defend service members through every phase: Article 32 preliminary hearings, motions practice, panel voir dire, trial, sentencing, and appellate review. Because both founding partners are former active-duty JAGs, we know this system from the inside: how charging decisions get made, how the record gets built, and which arguments a panel of officers is actually going to weigh.