Colonel Aubrey Dewitt Smith was the chief of the Logistics Section of the Plans and Operations Division at the headquarters, United States Army, Japan.

[4] On 3 October 1952, Dorothy Smith stabbed her husband with a 10-inch (250 mm) long hunting knife while he slept in their Army quarters in Japan.

Dorothy Smith's defense lawyer, Lieutenant Colonel Howard S. Levie, initially argued that the court had no legal jurisdiction over the wife of an Army officer.

[7] The court martial was told that Dorothy Smith had undergone two months' treatment for mental illness in 1951, and had attempted suicide while on the ship to Japan the year before.

Her personal physician, Brigadier General Rawley E. Chambers, told the court that Dorothy Smith was subject to "neurotic explosions", that she had slashed her wrists a number of times, and that she once had assaulted another Army wife.

"[5] By six votes to three, the court martial found Dorothy Smith guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced her "to be confined at hard labor for the rest of her natural life".

Brigadier General Adam Richmond, who had been judge advocate of the Third United States Army when it had been commanded by Krueger in the early 1940s,[7] argued that Dorothy was not sane at the time of the incident, and that the testimony that the court-martial had heard to the contrary was military rather than medical.

Chief Judge Robert E. Quinn dissented on the grounds that the prosecution's expert witnesses testified in accordance with Army regulations rather than their knowledge and medical experience,[5] feeling bound by the restrictive terms of the joint Air Force (AFM 160-42) and Army (TM 8–240) manual, Psychiatry in Military Law.

Covert, the wife of an Air Force Sergeant who had killed her sleeping husband with an ax in England on 9 March 1953, from Alderson on a $1,000 bond.

This in turn was based on a recent ruling by the United States Supreme Court on 7 November 1955 in the case of Robert W. Toth, a former Air Force Sergeant.

In 1916, Congress specifically extended the scope of the articles of war to cover all civilians accompanying military forces outside the United States.

[15] It specified that civilians were subject to the UCMJ: (10) In time of war, persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field; (11) Subject to any treaty or agreement to which the United States is or may be a party or to any accepted rule of international law, persons serving with employed by or accompanying the armed forces outside the United States ... [13] These were the provisions under which Dorothy Smith was tried.

The United States had struck executive agreements with Great Britain and Japan allowing American citizens to be tried under the UCMJ rather than local law.

Writing for the majority, Justice Tom C. Clark wrote: Furthermore, since under the principles of international law each nation has jurisdiction of the offenses committed within its own territory ... the essential choice involved here is between an American and a foreign trial.

Under these circumstances, Congress may well have determined that trial before an American court-martial in which the fundamentals of due process are assured was preferable to leaving American servicemen and their dependents throughout the world subject to widely varying standards of justice unfamiliar to our people ... No question of the legal relation between treaties and the Constitution is presented.

[20] On 8 October 1956, the first order day of its 1956 term, the Supreme Court asked J. Lee Rankin, the United States Solicitor General, for a response to Wiener's petition, which was granted on 5 November 1956.

It was a stunning development; it was the first time since it had first sat in 1790 that it had reversed a decision without a major intervening change in its membership,[7] for even without Brennan, the verdict would have been the same.

[20] Writing for the plurality, Justice Hugo Black wrote: These cases raise basic constitutional issues of the utmost concern.