Military Justice - United States

United States

Main article: Military tribunals in the United States See also: Judge Advocate General's Corps

The United States Constitution authorized the creation of a system of military justice. Article I, Section 8 permits the U.S. Congress to "make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces." Congress issued these rules first in 1806 as the Articles of War. Military justice during the American Civil War was governed by the 1863 Lieber Code. The Articles of War were superseded in 1951 by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

The UCMJ is federal law, found in Title 10 United States Code Chapter 47, and implemented by the Manual for Courts-Martial, an executive order issued by the President of the United States in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces. Court-martial convictions in the United States may be appealed through miltary courts of appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF), a federal appellate court consisting of five civilian judges appointed by the President of the United States. CAAF decisions are subject to direct view by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The offenses covered by the UCMJ include those encompassed by "high crimes and misdemeanors" which covers officials generally, and includes perjury of oath, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming, and refusal to obey a lawful order. It also includes ordinary crimes, but perhaps with different standards of proof and punishment than for civilians, on the grounds that more is expected of military personnel by their oaths of office. Many of the terms used date back to that era of law.

Read more about this topic:  Military Justice

Famous quotes related to united states:

    “What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Europe and the U.K. are yesterday’s world. Tomorrow is in the United States.”
    —R.W. ‘Tiny’ Rowland (b. 1917)

    “An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
    —Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

    “What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
    —Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)

    “And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
    —John Dos Passos (1896–1970)