My Lords, I remind the Committee that I still have an interest as I will be commissioned until October, when I have to retire.
At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, suggested that we needed to look at the composition and operation of the court martial. The Minister said that it would be a big change to alter these arrangements. However, that is why we have a quinquennial review. The MoD can quite easily change the court martial rules but bigger changes are a matter for us in Parliament.
One of the problems we have with some of the suggestions from the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, is that we have very little idea of how either a civil jury or a court martial board works because research is illegal, except for certain criminal investigations. Therefore, the Minister cannot prove that the system is as good as we can make it, and the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, cannot show that it is defective—we do not know how the system operates. The difficulty is particularly relevant to the noble Lord’s amendment on majority verdicts. The Committee needs to remember that the board of a court martial is not a jury; it is composed of officers and warrant officers superior in rank to the defendant. My Amendment 11 proposes to permit closely controlled research into how the board works. I envisage that this would take place soon after all normal appeal rights had been exhausted or were time-expired. Members of the board would not be told in advance that they would be contributing to the research, and there would have to be numerous other protections.
In Amendment 1, the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, proposes that the board of a court martial be composed of “all ranks”. Presumably, if the amended is accepted, court martial boards would provide that members must be at least one rank superior to the accused. Interestingly, I do not have a problem with his proposal,
provided that the noble Lord recognises that he is moving away from a very select panel who have already been chosen as officers and warrant officers on the basis of a whole range of qualities that other ranks do not necessarily possess. If he wants to do that, I think we will need a military jury of 12. They will still understand the military context, which is surely the reason we have a military court martial, and the increased number I am suggesting would make up for any reduction in intellectual horsepower. I would suggest that on average a military jury could be of better quality and more suited to these cases than a civilian one, and therefore an all-ranks military jury could be just as reliable as a civil jury.
However, there are some snags. I suspect that the noble Lord feels that an all-ranks board would be more forgiving and understanding. I am not convinced. For instance, I fear that an all-ranks board could be swayed by the accused appearing to be a rotten soldier when military jury members are sure that they are not. The officers on the board of a court martial would put that to one side and study it with much more intellectual rigour. I suspect that the noble Lord would still have some officers on the board or the jury, but I cannot really envisage a junior NCO asking searching questions to test an officer’s position on a case, even though a large proportion would undoubtedly be able to do so. A warrant officer certainly would, which is why we already have them on the board.
Finally I turn to the noble Lord’s amendment concerning who determines the sentence. If we went for a military jury of 12, this would be merely a consequential change. Again, I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, believes that the judge advocate would be more lenient. I have to tell the Committee that I have heard, although I should not have, that on one occasion the board of a court martial in Germany dealing with an assault case regretted not being able to consider a not-guilty verdict because the accused pleaded guilty. Nevertheless, the judge advocate was recommending quite severe penalties which the board had to resist strongly. In any case, complex though the matters are, the judge advocate tells the members of the board of the court martial what their options are. The sentence is internally reviewed and the case can then be taken to the court martial appeals court, so it is not clear to me what can go wrong.
Lastly, I do not have a view on the noble Lord’s suggestions about which offences should be triable only in a civilian court.