In a unique blend of history and career exploration, the 82d Airborne Division’s Office of the Staff Judge Advocate (OSJA) embarked on a meaningful joint staff ride with North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University’s (NCA&T) Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets last spring. Participants visited the Revolutionary War’s Guilford Courthouse battlegrounds. This staff ride served as more than just a historical excursion; it was a strategic effort to connect judge advocates (JAs) with potential future members of the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps.

The air in the courtroom is thin. After sitting in the same confined space for the past several days, spectators and litigants alike are achy and ready for the trial to end. The panel members, seated in all their regalia, maintain a stoic and serious expression, even though it appears their energy may be waning. The mood remains tense, both in front of and behind the bar. The accused, whom the panel has just found guilty of an Article 120 offense, is facing a potentially significant punishment for his crime. Though tired and sweaty, the Government and Defense are prepared and ready to plunge into the sentencing hearing that has just begun, hoping to obtain their desired outcome.

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System (Junk Science) outlines the history of pseudoscience’s beguiling of our courts. The book’s principal focus is “bite mark analysis, but it just as easily could have been shaken baby syndrome, arson investigation, hair microscopy, bullet lead analysis, polygraphs, voice spectrometry, handwriting, [or] bloodstain pattern analysis.” M. Chris Fabricant lays out a compelling case for why these techniques have been sufficiently discredited that they have no place in our justice system. At first blush, the bite mark analysis focus seems to limit his ability to speak more broadly to the book’s titular issue. 

The American Revolution has often been noted for its incongruities. The product of a highly ideological cause, the American republic was also “born in an act of violence,” in the words of one commentator. In other words, to secure the “new world” that Thomas Paine and other revolutionaries envisioned, the United States would have to man, train, and equip a military force capable of winning a bloody land conflict with the British Empire. The oftentimes countervailing forces of philosophical ideals and military necessity thus constituted one of the central tensions in the American War of Independence. The administration of military justice in the Continental Army is a prime example of this tension.