In the U.S. military, criminal and disciplinary offenses that are not serious enough to require a court-martial can be addressed by non-judicial punishment (NJP) under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
NJP hearings are conducted by commanding officers. The hearings are not subject to the procedural rigidity and requirements of courts-martial. In return, servicemembers can only be subjected to relatively light punishments at NJP, and avoid the stigma of having a criminal conviction on their records. Servicemembers maintain the right to decline NJP proceedings and face court-martial instead.
Unlike courts-martial, records on NJP are not centrally kept, and the proceedings are not open to the public. That makes it harder to find out what offenses are punished by NJP. While the minor punishments of NJP tend to make such opacity more palatable, several concerns remain. For one, allegations of racial disparities in the administration of NJP are difficult to assess without adequate data. For another, there is the troubling possibility that NJP procedures could be abused to permit serious offenses such as war crimes from being swept under the rug, thus avoiding unwanted public attention.
It is valuable when military units do post summaries of NJPs to permit the public to see how commanding officers are using the procedures. One recent example from Sheppard Air Force Base chronicles 18 recent NJPs of airmen, listing both the offenses and punishments (but not listing the names of the offenders).
“Service members maintain the right to decline NJP proceedings and face court-martial instead” — except when they are “attached to or embarked on a vessel." See Art. 15(a).
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