A 5-0 ruling from America’s top military court has tossed the 2012 rape conviction of a Coast Guard petty officer — and exposed a clear case of political pressure producing rank injustice.

The US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces found that four admirals, in an obvious bid to please civilian higher-ups, stacked the jury. Its seven members included five women, four of whom had jobs advocating for victims of sexual assault. This, from an overall jury pool less than a one-fifth female.

Judge Margaret Ryan’s opinion also slammed the trial judge for failing to conduct “even a rudimentary investigation” into defense counsel’s complaints about the jury pool, and a lower court, the Coast Guard Court of Appeals, for rationalizing the tampering “as a benign effort to seek inclusiveness.”

She also noted that the evidence was so weak that a proper jury would’ve been unlikely to convict.

“The error in this case is both so obvious and so egregious that it adversely affected not only Appellant’s right to a fair trial by an impartial panel, but also the essential fairness and integrity of the military justice system,” the court ruled.

The US military’s need to do a far better job handling sexual abuse, including assaults, doesn’t excuse what Ryan rightly called this “stain on the military justice system.”