While all of this was going on, the Supreme Court was in the midst of a revolution in its own jurisprudence, recognizing a constitutional right on the part even of indigent criminal defendants to pursue appeals of their convictions and sentences, and invigorating a raft of new substantive constitutional protections that could be invoked in such appeals. Finally, in 1983, Congress tied these two threads together, giving the Supreme Court direct appellate jurisdiction, for the first time, over the military justice system.

But Congress limited the Supreme Court’s power over courts-martial to those cases that had been heard by the Court of Military Appeals — which, like the Supreme Court, generally has the power to pick and choose which cases it hears. Last year, for example, that court (now known as the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces) heard arguments and handed down opinions in just 35 of the 360 petitions for review that it received.

If it were clear that the military appeals court agreed to hear every case that might potentially be worthy of the Supreme Court’s review, that would be one thing. But a 2016 study by a military lawyer found that most of what the court did was to correct case-specific errors that don’t broadly affect the military justice system, while denying review to cases that could . Earlier this month, the military appeals court turned away an Army staff sergeant’s request to summarily affirm his conviction (rather than deny review) so he could take his case to the Supreme Court. His case turned on whether his lack of access to potentially exculpatory evidence would require a new trial, a question that has divided the federal courts of appeals.

Worse still, the government routinely takes the position that the Supreme Court can review only the specific issues the military appeals court decides, and not the entire case it hears. Last month, for example, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging whether the Constitution allows the military to court-martial military retirees for offenses committed after leaving active duty. The government had argued that, even though the military appeals court had agreed to hear the case, the Supreme Court could not review it because the military court had not agreed to consider that specific issue.

The result of these developments is that only a tiny minority of service members convicted by court-martial are entitled to appeal their conviction to the Supreme Court. In that regard, service members are not only treated worse than every other criminal defendant in state and federal courts, they’re also treated worse than the noncitizen enemy combatants being tried at Guantánamo. Under the Military Commissions Act of 2009, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, and his fellow military commission defendants have a statutory right to appeal any conviction not just to the civilian courts, but ultimately to seek review by the justices themselves.