How the Military Trial Results Data Was Built
How 11,328 courts-martial from the services' public records were collected, how each result is read, what each service includes, the known gaps, and how the trend posts count.
Understanding Trends in Military Practice · 6 min read
Trends › Methodology
In brief: The trend posts on this site are built from 11,328 courts-martial in the services' public trial records, published under Article 140a, UCMJ, plus Coast Guard summary reports and appellate opinions. The services publish these records differently, and some publish less than the law requires, so each trial result is read — by optical character recognition (OCR) and by hand — to recover the findings article by article. Every number is recomputed from the live data each time it changes. The data shows trial dates, not offense dates, and it has gaps by service and year, listed below.
Where the Records Come From
- Army: public court-martial records, 2020–2026 (2,833 cases)
- Air Force: public court-martial records, 2015–2026 (2,952 cases)
- Navy: public court-martial records, 2013–2026 (2,887 cases)
- Marine Corps: public court-martial records, 2013–2026 (2,176 cases)
- Coast Guard: public court-martial records, 2005–2026 (480 cases)
Navy and Marine Corps cases also come from the monthly court-martial reports and each case's Statement of Trial Results. Coast Guard cases also come from the Coast Guard's quarterly Good Order and Discipline reports. Some Air Force findings come from Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals opinions.
How the Data Is Built
Building one dataset means reading each service's records on their own terms. For more on what the services publish and what they leave out, see Lawyers Complain About Data.
- Reading scanned results. Many results are posted as scanned PDF images a computer cannot search. Every Result of Trial that can be opened is run through OCR, and the ones that fail the first pass are re-run. A record that still cannot be read — so far, one encrypted Army file — is requested under the Freedom of Information Act rather than dropped.
- Findings article by article. Some services' initial reports mark a partial acquittal simply as a "conviction," without saying which UCMJ articles ended in a conviction and which ended in an acquittal. Those cases are checked against the full trial result and, where one exists, the appellate opinion, so the not-guilty findings are recorded rather than lost.
- The 2019 renumbering. The Military Justice Act of 2016 renumbered many UCMJ articles effective January 1, 2019, so the same number can mean different offenses before and after that date. Offenses are labeled by what they are; a pre-2019 offense is shown as "Art. N (former: offense)" so an old number is never read as the current one.
- Counsel of record. For the Navy and Marine Corps, the only public source that names trial and defense counsel is the trial docket, which gives last names only and drops a case once it is finished. The data behind that docket, including archived copies of past dockets, is pulled and matched to each completed result to identify counsel. This work is the reason Learn Your Lawyer does not yet have Navy and Marine Corps pages.
- Air Force acquittals. The Air Force public docket rarely lists the charges in a full acquittal and publishes no name for an acquitted Airman. Where the current docket lists the charges (2024 on), they are added; earlier charges, and the names the Air Force withholds, are being recovered from archived dockets.
What Each Service's Records Include
| Service | Cases | Trial years | Judge named | Both counsel named | Plea listed | Forum listed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Army | 2,833 | 2020–2026 | 99% | 89% | 100% | 99% |
| Air Force | 2,952 | 2015–2026 | 97% | 99% | 70% | 99% |
| Navy | 2,887 | 2013–2026 | 25% | 4% | 99% | 76% |
| Marine Corps | 2,176 | 2013–2026 | 38% | 2% | 82% | 91% |
| Coast Guard | 480 | 2005–2026 | 11% | 0% | 15% | 11% |
Known Gaps
- Only the trial date is recorded, not the offense date. Law changes that depend on the offense date are described as transition periods.
- Army records start in 2020 and fill in during 2021, and the results are scanned PDFs read by OCR.
- Air Force reports a partial acquittal as a conviction and does not break out which articles were convicted or acquitted; records from 2016 to 2020 often omit the plea; the Air Force rarely lists the charges in a full acquittal, publishes no name in an acquittal, and never reports plea agreements.
- Navy and Marine Corps name the judge for cases referred since December 2020 but not the lawyers; the monthly reports since 2013 name no counsel, and the trial docket names counsel by surname only and only recently.
- Coast Guard summary reports name no one, give no location, date cases by quarter, and list convictions only, so Coast Guard acquittals before 2021 are missing.
- Plea agreements are used in trend posts for the Army only.
- Who sentenced a panel case is not recorded, so sentence comparisons are grouped by who decided guilt.
- Counsel of record: most cases list several lawyers per side, and the records do not say who led.
How We Count
- Contested = a not-guilty or mixed plea. Acquittal rates use contested cases with a result posted.
- Partial acquittal = not guilty of at least one charge or specification, guilty of another.
- Confinement is the adjudged sentence, before plea-agreement caps, clemency, or appeal.
- Percentages are shown only when at least 10 cases stand behind them; smaller groups are shown as counts ("3 of 7").
- Comparisons are against the same service in the same years unless a page says otherwise. Navy and Marine Corps are grouped together because they share one trial judiciary.
- Minimum size: a post needs enough cases to support at least 700 words of findings. Smaller slices are folded into multi-year, installation, or regional pages.
- Experience = courts-martial a lawyer had already been counsel of record on in this data before the trial date.
- Judges: trend posts never report figures for an individual judge. Each judge's record is on Know Your Judge.
Updates and Corrections
When the trial data is updated, every trend post is recomputed. A post shows "Last updated" only when its own numbers changed. If a record looks wrong, it is almost always because the service's own report is incomplete; see Lawyers Complain About Data. To report an error, email content@bodiesburied.com.
Methodology Updates
The definitions above are stable. How the data is built improves as more records are recovered, and each change is logged here with its date.
- November 1, 2026. Added the "How the Data Is Built" section: reading each result by OCR, recording findings article by article where a service reports a partial acquittal as a flat conviction, labeling offenses across the 2019 UCMJ renumbering, matching the Navy and Marine Corps trial docket (including archived dockets) to completed results for counsel, and adding Air Force full-acquittal charges where the current docket lists them, with older charges and the names the Air Force withholds in acquittals being recovered from archived dockets.
Federal court comparisons use separate data, described in How the Federal Comparison Data Was Built and collected at Federal Prosecution Analysis.
About the author. Jocelyn C. Stewart is a retired Army JAG with more than 24 years of trying courts-martial and more than 200 jury trials. She hosts Where All The Bodies Are Buried and runs the Law Office of Jocelyn C. Stewart. This analysis is for education and information only. It is not legal advice, and every case is different.