The Military Rules of Evidence: A Short History of Their Origin and Adoption at Courts-Martial

摘要

The Military Rules of Evidence (MRE) have been a permanent feature of courts-martial practice for more than thirty years. While practitioners today are comfortable with the rules and accept their permanence in military criminal trials, their adoption in 1980 was the end result of a long and contentious struggle. This is the story of the origin of the MRE and their adoption at courts-martial. Prior to 1975, when the Congress enacted legislation establishing the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), the admissibility of evidence in U.S. courts was governed by Federal common law. Similarly, evidentiary rules at courts-martial were governed by a common law of evidence that had emerged from successive decisions from the Court of Military Appeals (COMA) and, to a lesser extent, the inferior service courts. The 1969 Manual for Courts-Martial (MCM), contained these judicial decisions, but it was difficult to know whether the MCM was adopting these "decisions as positive law or merely setting them forth for the edification of the reader."