Military Justice in America: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, 1775-1980 by Jonathan Lurie

    I was honestly very disappointed by this book. I was looking for a well-researched history of the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces with a focus on the development of the UCMJ and the case law of the court, but when I got was a history of the politics of political appointments. It was bizarre to me that Lurie would go through painstaking research, and obviously the book is well-researched, only to completely miss the forest for the trees. The interesting thing about CAAF isn't how Judge Latimer got appointed, the interesting thing about CAAF is how it developed jurisprudence out of a brand new code, the UCMJ, and had to do it to balance the needs of the military with the revolution that came with the UCMJ demanding that courts-martial be run like federal courts. Instead, Lurie focuses on minutiae that really don't matter.
     I found the discussion of Ansell and Crowder's debate within the Army JAG world about military justice during WWI to be interesting as a setup for the battles over the UCMJ in the 1940s, but Lurie was much more interested in personalities than policy. But I learned that without the movement that began with them, there really would not have been a true legal system in the military. Courts-martial were not really courts in any modern sense of the word until the UCMJ, since they didn't have judges, and often didn't even have lawyers. Lurie focuses in on the importance of appellate review: defendants didn't have recourse to appeal decisions to anyone but the JAG of his service, and then to the President. Creating CAAF was critical in ensuring real justice since there would be real review of the justice system. Ansell proposed obvious ideas like appointing a JAG for every general or special court-martial, and creating the basis for the modern Preliminary Hearing Officer/swearing to the charges with the concept that charges may not be referred without being reviewed for sufficiency by a competent JAG. 

    In the reforms that led to the UCMJ, Congress basically had six complaints post-WWII: the conviction rate was too high (88%), the punishments were excessive (resulting in reduction by later review boards in 75% of cases), there were wide discrepancies in punishments for the same offenses, rights of the accused were not protected during a court-martial proceeding, defense counsel was often incompetent, and sentences rendered by the court could be increased before the court-martial ended. These criticisms resulted from the increased scrutiny on military justice due to the massive exposure of Americans to military justice in WWII. During the war, over 1.7 million trials were held, more than a 100 executions were carried out, and 45,000 servicemembers were in prison at the end of the war. Above all, Americans were appalled by command influence corrupting courts-martial. Gerald Ford, who had been in the Navy during WWII, recalled sitting on boards where members asked "what's the Old Man [referring to the commander] want us to do? He testified to that effect while a Michigan congressman.

    The critical thing, Lurie points out, that developed military justice was not just the Code, but that the Code was paired with an appellate review process that could enforce the Code. CAAF has remained in a weird twilight zone as an Article I court with Article III properties, but has been critical in ensuring the administration of military justice in a way totally counter to the pre-Code era. I wish the book had focused more on how they actually did that.