The U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 20, 2024, denied two petitions calling for a review of more than a dozen cases in which the military’s top appeals court ruled that unanimous verdicts are unnecessary for criminal convictions in courts-martial. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)

The Supreme Court has declined to hear two cases challenging the constitutionality of split-jury guilty verdicts in military court.

Justices on Tuesday denied two petitions calling for a review of more than a dozen cases in which the U.S. military’s top appeals court ruled that unanimous verdicts are unnecessary for criminal convictions at courts-martial.

The court did not issue a statement explaining the decision. At least four justices must grant a petition for the court to hear the case.

Lawyers representing the service members in their final appeal attempt before the nation’s high court argued their clients have a constitutional right to a unanimous verdict by a military jury.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a two-thirds majority is required for a guilty verdict in a general court-martial, the most serious type of military trial.

That law has come under a flurry of challenges since April 2020, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned split jury verdicts in state criminal cases. The 6-3 decision in Ramos v. Louisiana said state courts are also bound by the long-standing requirement in federal courts that all jurors must agree for a defendant to be convicted.

“If, as Ramos held, unanimous verdicts are necessary in the civilian criminal justice system ‘to ensure impartiality,’ it ought to follow that they are equally necessary to achieve the same result in a court-martial,” lawyers in Jonathan M. Martinez et al v. United States wrote in a September 2023 filing before the Supreme Court.

The Martinez petition consolidated appeals from 16 service members convicted by court-martial in the last two years.

The other petition from Anthony Anderson asserted a similar argument. The Air Force master sergeant was convicted on two specifications of attempted sexual abuse of a child during a court-martial at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. The charges stemmed from online communications he had with a fictitious 13-year-old girl. He was sentenced to 12 months in prison, demotion to E-1 and a dishonorable discharge.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces rejected his claim that his conviction should be tossed because of the split verdict, observing that nonunanimous decisions “have been a feature of American courts-martial since the founding of our nation’s military justice system.”

In Martinez, each of the defendants requested that jurors be told a unanimous verdict was required for any guilty finding, a motion denied by the judge, according to the Supreme Court petition. Like Anderson’s case, their appeals were ultimately denied by the military’s highest court.

Given the importance of the issue “to the future of the military justice system, this Court ought to have the last word on the matter,” lawyers for Martinez and the other 15 defendants said in their Supreme Court filing.

Government lawyers in the Anderson case argued that the matter should be left to military courts, “in light of the military’s status as a community that stands ‘apart from civilian society’ ” and where primary oversight comes from Congress and the president.