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Race, I was going to just let this go by and not respond, but, in the end, I felt that I had to just to clear up some misconceptions that you obviously have about the military justice system.

I have been involved in military courts-martial since 1978 as a court reporter. After two years in the Navy, I came into the Army in 1975 as an infantryman and then competed against paralegal specialists in the 1st Cavalry Division for a school position at the Court Reporter School. I graduated first in my class at the Naval Justice School (where Army court reporters went to train back then) in 1978 and have had no other job since then. I retired as a Sergeant First Class in 1995 and was hired as the only civil service court reporter on Fort Hood immediately thereafter. In 2003, the three jurisdictions on Fort Hood ((1st Cavalry Division, 4th Infantry Division, and III Corps) consolidated their court reporter sections and I was placed in charge of the section .. myself and 10 military court reporters. Since my graduation in 1978, I have been the court reporter of record in at least 100 courts-martial every year and, since 2003, have supervised the other 10 reporters on Fort Hood in their cases as well.

To start with, out of all of the courts-martial within any given year, 85% of them are guilty plea cases, where the accused has agreed to plead guilty in exchange for sentencing consideration by the Convening Authority. Probably 95% of these are held without a panel for sentencing in front of a military judge alone. Thus, right from the start, 85% of all military courts-martial result in a conviction .. because the accused pleads guilty.

Of the remaining 15% where the proceedings are contested, 10% are held before panels (juries, in the civilian context) composed of officers and warrant officers; if the accused is enlisted, the accused may request that the panel be composed of one-third enlisted personnel. In any event, none of these panel members will be junior in rank to the accused and none will be from his company-sized unit. The remaining 5% of the contested cases are held before the military judge alone, without a panel for either findings or sentence.

My gut feeling, after 30 years of being involved in more than 3000 courts-martial, is that, if the defense is arguing a legal/evidentiary point, the accused will select a military judge alone; if the accused is going to argue an emotional/evidentiary point, it will be before a panel.

Over 30 years, contested cases break pretty much even ... about half are aquittals and half are convictions. A lot of times, an accused will plead not guilty because the defense simply doesn't believe that the government can prove up its case, or the defense counsel can't convince the accused to plead guilty even though the unbiased evidence is heavily against him, or the accused can't get the deal that he wants to get from the Convening AUthority for a plea of guilty.

Military Rules of Evidence are identical to those used in civilian courts.

Appeals of courts-martial are AUTOMATIC to the Army (or Navy or Air Force) Court of Criminal Appeals if the sentence includes a bad conduct or dishonorable discharge or confinement for more than six months. I can tell you up front: probably 90% of all convictions are AUTOMATICALLY appealed. The Convening Authority has NOTHING to say with regard to the appeal process; the procedure is set forth by the Manual for Courts-Martial (signed into effect by the President of the United States and based on United States Codes) and AR 27-10.

The defense has a complete right to disclosure of ALL evidence against the accused. Nothing will get a judge pissed off quicker or a conviction overturned on appeal faster than the government playing hide-the-ball with the evidence. Ambush witnesses are not allowed; the defense has to be informed up front of all witnesses that are going to be called and given a chance to interview them prior to the proceedings. Courts have been delayed, sometimes for months, when new evidence or new witnesses have been discovered (or "discovered") and the defense requests time for further investigation and/or interviews. Cases have been overturned by the Courts of Criminal Appeal or the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (which is the next step up from the Courts of Criminal Appeal and one step below the Supreme Court) if new evidence is discovered or it is found that the government withheld evidence from the defense. I know this because I have been involved in numerous re-hearings, either for both findings and sentence or just for sentence alone.

Now, classified documents or national security matters can be redacted or the session will go into a closed session with spectators and/or non-cleared personnel banned from the courdroom. However, evidence MUST be presented in court, whether open or closed, in front of a security-cleared panel (if there is a panel in the case), the judge, the trial counsel (the prosecutors), the defense counsel (whether civilian or military), the accused, and the court reporter. All court reporters are REQUIRED to maintain a SECRET security clearance so as to allow them to participate in courts-martial in which SECRET material and evidence is presented and discussed. If material higher than a SECRET level is being discussed, a court reporter with the appropriate security clearance must be detailed to that court. Again, there is no playing hide-the-ball. If the government doesn't want to present the unredacted material in open (or closed) court or redact enough of the material to get it reclassified to a lower security level, then that charge may not go forward. The accused always has the right to hear the evidence against him, at least in one form or another, and it must be enough for the panel or military judge to be able to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I know these things .. I have been involved in a number of courts-martial where classified material was involved .. and it came out, in one form or another, or the military judge dismissed the charge that it pertained to. I was the court-reporter-of-record in the Abu Ghraib case of US v. GRANER, the purported ringleader of the guards, as well as the supervising court reporter for US v LYNNDIE ENGLAND, the female with the proverbial "thumbs-up", as well as for most of the other Abu Ghraib cases.

All of that being said, I can unhesitatingly state that I would much prefer to be tried by a military court than by a civilian one ...

First, even though they may outrank you, this a jury truly of your peers. These are professionals who, every day, do the same things that you do, see the same things that you see, and feel the same things that you do. These are not couch potatoes looking for something to do so they show up for jury duty; these are not half-wit civilians who are either too stupid, or too lazy, or too greedy to even attempt to get out of jury duty that the rest of their civilian counterparts seem to be able to do. These men and women, officer and enlisted, know that the accused is an individual just like themselves, who volunteered to serve their country, and whose careers are on the line in these courts. They listen intently to the evidence presented and weigh it carefully.

These are NOT kangaroo courts.

There have been some very serious cases of alleged murder, rape, assault, and the like in which I have participated where the accused is acquitted of all charges or at least the most serious ones, because these panels are serious about what they do.

The very fact that the system acquitted all of these individuals or dismissed the charges before/during trial goes against your argument against the military justice system.

Now, processing charges is a completely different thing. That is under the control of the commanders of the accused and the Convening Authority. The charges are sworn out against the accused usually by the accused's immediate company commander, a person who usually has some (if not a lot) of knowledge about and contact with the accused. In many cases, charges do not reach the courts-martial because the company commander or some intermediate commander determines that the charges can be resolved at a lower level of non-judicial punishment (Article 15 or summary courts). If the charges are serious enough, they have to go to the equivalent of a military grand jury, called an Article 32 proceeding. There, an unbiased senior officer with no connection with the military justice system .. just some infantry, artillery, armor, or personnel services officer .. is detailed as an investigating officer and the prosecution must convince him, by presentation of the evidence that the government has, that the charges should go forward. The accused must be present at this proceeding and is detailed a military defense counsel from the Trial Defense Services .. which operates independently from the military justice system within that jurisdiction .. and may be represented by a civilian lawyer if he pays for it himself. After presentation of the evidence by both sides, the investigating officer makes a recommendation to the Convening Authority as to what level of court .. Special or General .. the charges should be adjudicated at or even if the charges should be completely or partially dismissed.

However, the Convening Authority .. the Commanding General of the jurisdiction .. has the final say on whether or not charges go forward. Sometimes he takes the advice of the investigating officer and sometimes not, but he is required, by regulation, to consider it. At that point, the charges are referred (or dismissed) to a specific court-martial convening order, which designates the panel which will set in judgment on the case and the trial proceeds.

There is much, much more involved than I have laid out here. Sometimes cases which look like a slam-dunk going into trial blow up in the face of the government because a witness changes their testimony from earlier statements or critical evidence is not allowed to be admitted because the technical rules of evidence haven't been met and the judge won't allow it in; or a borderline case becomes a certain conviction by the merest gesture or statement of a witness.

As a case in point: a lot of the "he said/she said" sex offense cases that come before panels can usually go either way, unless there is solid physical evidence of injury or DNA results. If the panel gets it into their head that the accusing female is bending the truth or not believeable, then even a good amount of circumstantial or even hard evidence won't convince them otherwise and they'll acquit.

On the other hand, in one particular case in which I was involved, it was a child sodomy case, where the accused was charged with anally sodomizing a five year old girl. He was a solid soldier, no previous record, and the evidence was borderline ... certainly nothing to reach the "beyond a reasonable doubt" stage. However, when the little girl got on the stand to testify about the incident, she was so believeable and credible that I'm sure that's what led the panel to convict the accused. In one part of her testimony, when the government asked her how she knew that it was the accused who was anally sodomizing her, she, quite frankly and freely said, "Because I looked over my shoulder and saw him." When she said that, she turned slightly in her chair and actually looked over her shoulder. I can tell you .. that motion convinced me that she was telling the truth and, in addition to all of the other physical evidence and statements, that the accused was guilty of the act.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. As the court reporter, I and my counterparts are always a neutral in the proceedings. We're there to mark evidence, record the proceedings, do the post-trial paperwork, and transcribe and assemble the record of trial for the appellate process .. which, unlike your belief, ALWAYS takes place.

I would much prefer to be tried by a military court-martial than by a civilian court, any day of the week. I have said so in different forums to anyone who would listen: the military system .. as it stands now .. is fairer to the accused than the civilian one. The juries are professional and contain individuals who you can trust your career and life to, unlike those who sit on civilian juries. Given the option, I've always told those to whom I have given military justice system training: if you commit a crime downtown, pray to whatever God that you pray to that, if the civilian authorities offer the case to them, the military takes jurisdiction. At least then you're not trusting your life to a jury of probably uneducated ne'er-do-wells whose only contact with the military is watching JAG or war movies on The Movie Channel.

By the way, I've been called to serve on civilian juries eight times in the past 20 years ... as soon as the attorneys ask me and are told that I'm a court reporter in the military justice system and have been one for 30 years, I'm excused. I have never sat on a civilian jury ... why? Well, my belief is that they know that I know the system and would try to hold their civilian court up to the level of the military system and they don't want anything to do with that.