764
Opinion of the Court
The Mutiny Act, then, was no measure of leniency for soldiers. With its passage, "the Army of William III. was governed under a severer Code than that made by his predecessors under the Prerogative authority of the Crown. The Mutiny Act, without displacing the Articles of War and those Military Tribunals under which the Army had hitherto been governed, gave statutory sanction to the infliction of Capital Punishments for offences rather Political than Military, and which had rarely been so punished under Prerogative authority." Clode 9-10. See also Duke & Vogel, The Constitution and the Standing Army: Another Problem of Court-Martial Jurisdiction, 13 Vand. L. Rev. 435, 443, and n. 40 (1960) (noting that the Articles of War of 1662 and 1686 prohibited the infliction in peacetime of punishment costing life or limb). Indeed, it was the Crown that later tempered the excesses of courts-martial wielding the power of capital punishment. It did so by stipulating in the Articles of War (which remained a matter of royal prerogative) that all capital sentences be sent to it for revision or approval. Clode 9-10.
Popular suspicion of the standing army persisted, 5 Macaulay 253-273, 393, and Parliament authorized the Mutiny Acts only for periods of six months and then a year, 3 id., at 51-53. But renewed they were time and again, and Parliament would alter the power of courts-martial to impose the death penalty for peacetime offenses throughout the next century. It withdrew the power altogether in 1713, 12 Anne, ch. 13, § 1, only to regret the absence of the penalty during the rebellion of 1715, Clode 49. The third of the Mutiny Acts of 1715 subjected the soldier to capital punishment for a wide array of peacetime offenses related to political disorder and troop discipline. Id., at 50. And, for a short time in the 18th century, Parliament allowed the Crown to invest courts-martial with a general criminal jurisdiction over soldiers even at home, placing no substantive limit on the penalties that could be imposed; until 1718, that jurisdiction was
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