Disciplinary Offences at the Court Martial

Abstract: The aim of this article is to examine the operation of the court martial in respect of these disciplinary offences. It does so by undertaking a doctrinal and empirical analysis of the prosecutions for offences contrary to Part 1 of the AFA in the period January 2010 to April 2015. The results of every court martial during that period of time have been made publicly available by the Ministry of Defence as part of the government‟s “transparency and open data initiative”. The article begins by examining the dataset released by the Ministry of Defence, including the limitations of the data, and the procedure by which defendants arrive at the court martial. This is significant because, as with the civilian criminal justice system, there are a number of filters in place which serve to curtail the cases which come to court. Subsequently, the article examines a number of findings from the data, including annual prosecution rates, the most common offences charged, the number of charges laid against each defendant, the spread of defendants across the three services, and conviction rates. As these findings are discussed, the article provides substantive doctrinal analysis of a number of these offences given their potential novelty to some readers.