Changing the Way We Defend Veterans in Criminal Courts | Brock Hunter

What happens when one attorney realizes helping veterans one case at a time isn't enough?

Brock Hunter is a criminal defense attorney, U.S. veteran, founder of the Veterans Defense Project, and author of The Attorney's Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court. He has spent his career reshaping how the legal system treats those who've served. In 2008, he helped pass a veterans sentencing statute in Minnesota: legislation that caught the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court and sparked nationwide state legislation.

But this episode starts somewhere more fundamental, with an honest look at how military service and exposure to violence actually affects people, and how those changes ripple into families, communities, and courtrooms. When we better understand how veterans find their way into the system, we better understand why compassion and accountability help bring them back to our communities.

Brock's book, The Attorney's Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court puts that philosophy into practice. It covers combat PTSD, the attorney-client relationship, and legal strategies for every stage of a case. It even helped divert two of Aaron’s own clients from prison to mental health treatment.

If you work in law, mental health, veterans services, or simply care about how society treats the people it sends to war, this one's for you.

Buy Brock’s book here

Watch on Youtube 

Subscribe to our Substack Newsletter

Our website: sanctuaryinthejungle.net 

Instagram: @sanctuary_inthe_jungle

TikTok:  ⁨@SanctuaryintheJungle⁩  

Facebook: Sanctuary in the Jungle

Transcript

Meet Veteran Defense Attorney Brock Hunter

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The infliction of violence on other people profoundly changes people. And even the preparation and the psychological conditioning that it takes to prepare normal young people to do those terrible things has profound impacts on them, even if they don't ever do them.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

I'm your host, Aaron Nelson. Often when I talk about building a sanctuary for my clients, I'm usually doing it one client at a time, helping individuals case by case. Today's guest has spent his career thinking broader by working to change the system itself. Brock Hunter is a criminal defense attorney just across the river in Minnesota, a veteran and the founder of the Veterans Defense Project. In 2008, he helped pass a veteran sentencing statute in Minnesota. When it was cited in the Supreme Court, other states started paying attention. Brock found himself traveling the country, helping introduce similar legislation in other states, and eventually returning to update the Minnesota statute where it all began. This legislation helps give veterans a pathway to treatment, even when their jurisdiction doesn't have a veterans court. But before we get into any of that, we start at the beginning discussing how military service and violence can profoundly change people and the way they participate in society. When we understand this, we start to see public safety differently and rethink how we, as a community, should create it. I hope you enjoy. Here's Brock. Welcome, Brock.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Thank you. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Yeah, tell us a little bit about just to get everybody to know you, tell us a little bit about what you do and where you're at right now. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

I'm a criminal defense lawyer based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We practice all types of criminal defense uh but focus on more serious crimes and have a focus on defending veterans uh in the criminal courts. Um and have been doing that for about 27 years now.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Wow, yeah. And I I know you've uh, like you said, you have a a breadth of experience in all kinds of things, but we really want to get into some of the stuff with defending veterans. Uh you've literally wrote the book on it, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 2:31

One of, yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

You're the editor at least of the book over here, uh uh Veterans Defense Projects Attorney's Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court. You and your partner, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 2:42

My partner, uh Ryan Ells and I, yeah, uh co-edited that book. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

All right. Well, let's talk about the journey and how you how you maybe got to that book and got to be the the one of the national experts, if not the national expert on it. And so you're uh you're a Midwesterner, you grew up in the Midwest. Where were you born?

SPEAKER_00 2:59

I I was born and raised in Rapid City, South Dakota, um, and uh graduated high school there and and uh went into the military straight out of high school uh and uh did a four-year stint in the army and uh got out. I went to college, undergraduate in South Dakota, and and then moved to Minnesota to go to law school at the University of Minnesota and been around Minnesota ever since. Ever since.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Well, let's let's dive into some of that. You kind of had a change there uh in your teen years in your high school, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Yeah, yeah. I was I was one of those kids in middle school who uh I was getting good good scores on standardized tests, but my grades were not reflecting that. I was not fulfilling my potential. And uh my my parents uh uh put me into a private Catholic school that was much more academically rigorous, and that was a very, I think, beneficial thing for me at that time. And so I was in this very much more academically strenuous environment, and all of my peers were heading off to college, and I guess I kind of assumed I would be as well. And uh one day, my summer before my senior year of of uh high school, my dad called me into his office and uh asked me if I thought how I was gonna pay for college. And this was not a topic of conversation I had been having with my friends, and uh I had vaguely assumed I would be going to college, but it wasn't something I was giving a lot of thought to. And he explained that and as I had knew at the time my my family was going through some financial difficulties, so they were not in a position to pay for college. And uh he slid a big envelope across the desk to me that was a bunch of information about the Army GI Bill and College Fund, which uh was a shock to my system to say the least, and uh I uh didn't know what to make of it, and uh staggered out of his office and sat down and started looking through the stuff and and uh relatively quickly s got kind of excited about it. I think he he I think saw in me that I would benefit from doing something in life for a little bit before and maturing a bit before going to college and and uh thought this would be a good thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Was there any history in your family of service to the armed forces?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

My dad was in ROTC in college and was proud of the fact that he had more demerits than anyone in the program and and did not do well. So no, there was really no distinguished military history in my family. Sweet.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

He wondered why you needed some structure coming out of middle school.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

I think yeah, he probably saw that uh I I had similar issues to what he probably had.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Up till that point, were you pretty active? Were you playing sports in the band? What were you?

SPEAKER_00 5:53

I yeah, I I was I was definitely pretty active and and growing up as a kid in in the you know, we lived right on the edge of Rapid City on the edge of the Black Hills National Forest, and I grew up running around in the woods and and uh uh it was very outdoorsy in that way, and so we that's kind of what I I think uh resonated about going into the military for me was that it was going to be a big adventure.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

I mean you you're uh going to high school in the 80s, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:22

You know, you're you're watching First Blood and uh whatever all the movies are out there about the the Cold War in American Red Dawn was a very formative movie as a kid, yeah, because it was kind of set in that western, you know, and my friends and I are running around with our BB guns in the woods playing Red Dawn.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Wolverines.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, and and it's interesting in in one of your earlier podcasts you were talking about Star Wars and it being sort of a modern form of mythology, and and that resonates with me because as a kid I was right in the heart of the the first Star Wars trilogy target market, right? And uh I never really put it together until years after the military, but I went to it uh uh there was an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts probably 15 or 20 years ago that was a Star Wars exhibition of Star Wars is this modern mythology, and looking at it from this more high-minded standpoint and how mythology has always played this role in society of mobilizing the masses towards these hero journey stories to go off and fight wars and stuff like that, right? And that Luke Skywalker was the classic mythological protagonist, and he's a kid as I went through that exhibit. I I just thought to myself, this they got me, you know. I I I uh going into the military, I consciously or not, was in my mind Luke Skywalker getting out of this uh backwater, you know, place uh off to go become a Jedi and and have big adventures, you know. Very naive uh perspective, uh, as I soon found out. But uh it definitely had an impact on my perceptions of that.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Um so you're back there on the on the couch, yeah, you know, reading through this stuff. Take us through that a little bit because that's a um again, maybe there's some naive thoughts that 17-year-old, 16-year-old boys just think of, then, right? But um sounds like it's very different from the people that you were hanging out with.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Nobody else had thought about the military. No, no, it it uh it was not it was not at all front and center in my mind and my perspective at that time. And yeah, I had friends, you know, we were all taking the ACTs and and all of that stuff, and everybody was was looking at going to college, and I felt oh boy, I felt a lot of trauma around that initially that I wasn't going to be going with them and going into that next stage of life like they were, and dread about that, and and uh but as I'm going through this military-related literature, there's all of these, you know, uh recruiting propaganda for lack of a better term, with with guys with green painted faces wading through chest deep water, you know, in jungles and stuff, and then all of a sudden all of my uh you know, all the movies I had grown up with and and all of this stuff started to impact, and I was like, oh, this is my chance to go be a Jedi, you know? And so I remember, I remember it was like an endorphin rush hit me as I was sitting there going through this, and I started to become very, very excited about this whole idea. And in a way, my parents did not anticipate.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Yeah, yeah. So you're how does that evolve over that course of your your senior year? You've now you've accepted this, right? Yeah, but you've you've got this group of friends who's going in that direction, and you've clearly decided maybe it's put upon you and you've accepted it, but you're taking a different path than them. I'm guessing that's hard to live through the next six months until you're on that path.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

Yeah, so so this conversation again, it happened the summer before my senior year that that uh that this started, and I actually went to the military recruiter and signed up on the delayed enlistment program. So I signed on the dotted line before my senior year even started. Um, and that trip off to the recruiter to formally engage in this process was very uh interesting in that I went and sat down and really had no sense, you know, other than going into the military, that's that was the thing, and to get the college fund. And they were going through all these various jobs, and I had done pretty well on the aptitude test, the military aptitude test. And so there's basically any job, and they were showing me a lot of more technical jobs, and I just wasn't feeling it. I was just like, Yeah, I know, I know, um computer stuff, no, not really, linguists, no, not really. And then going down this list, and they had all these occupations that were available at the time that they needed people in, and certain amounts of college benefits attached, and all of this stuff. And Cavalry Scout was there, and that jumped off the page. It didn't look like any of the other stuff. It just was like boom, and I was like, what is that? And the guy's like, Oh, well, you know, that's you gather intelligence, you go behind enemy lines and gather intelligence for the commander, the eyes and ears of the army. And I was like, that sounds interesting. And they had a little cassette, like video cassette thing for that job, and they plugged it in, you know, classic 80s technology, and I watched what was probably a three or four-minute video commercial for being a cavalry scout, and that was it. I was just like, And I can get the college fund for this. Yes, you can, but you'd have to do an additional amount of time in because I'd been thinking two or three years uh enlistment, and suddenly I was like, okay, oh, signed up, and uh I was so excited, and I come home and my parents are like, so everything went well, and I was like, Oh yeah. And what did what did you gonna do? And I said, I'm gonna be a cavalry scout, and I explained what that meant. And my mom looked at my dad like great, great idea, Dave. Yeah, yeah, maybe not at all what they had in mind um at all. But uh by then it was too late. I had already signed up, and that's what I was gonna be. So I went through my senior year of high school already knowing exactly what I was gonna be doing, and it was kind of surreal. Um, but but I was excited, you know. Yeah, by that time I was committed to this path.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

And was it um a sub were you somebody that was a risk taker, an adventurer up till that point? I mean, I know you said you were running around, but this is this is in line with who Brock Hunter is at that age.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, um, it wasn't that hard to predict, actually, uh that this was what I would probably end up doing and given that given that choice.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

But uh maybe we'll get into it a little bit more as we move on about how uh those of us in America think about the the Army, the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force, the services when we don't know anything about it, right? And it sounds like maybe your loving, supportive, wonderful mother had a different perception.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Oh, yeah, no, she saw me doing some kind of desk job in the rear with the gear, sort of kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And uh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

That's not how it played out.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

So you I'm sure they had some private conversations about this whole plan my dad had hatched that uh I wasn't privy to, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

And so you're in the army for four years as a um it's in the 90s?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Late 80s. So I I entered, I graduated from high school in 1987, and I I went off to to basic training two weeks later. Oh wow. Yeah. Really the crux of my service was I got orders to deploy to Korea, and uh, and this would have been in 89.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Um Yeah, bring us back to 89. What's going on in 89?

SPEAKER_00 14:27

1989 was the crescendo of the Cold War, um, as it turned out, and I arrived there right in early, like January of 89, I guess, and uh um once again kind of got to a juncture where I arrived at the Army's 2nd Infantry Infantry Division headquarters uh um at Camp Casey, and we're talking division is like 20 something U.S. troops that are the main combat force on the DMZ in Korea, and uh found myself in one of the more high-speed units in the division, uh right up on the edge of the DMZ. And our mission was to be the eyes and ears for the division commander and a quick reaction force for the division.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

And uh you one of those guys on the wall?

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Yeah, I mean, well, and over the wall. The DMZ isn't a solid border, it's a zone. Okay. And uh we uh we actually did live missions into the no man's land zone between the the fences, uh uh where I came to learn a lot of stuff was happening that wasn't really talked about publicly. There's as we used to say, there is no D in the DMZ. It's a very heavily militarized border and at that time very active with the North Koreans sending infiltrators across on a regular basis and a lot of stuff going on. And that year in particular was very busy because the Cold War was coming to this head, and in June of June of that year, the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in Beijing, about 300 miles to the west of us, and um that summer became a very turbulent time in the communist bloc with revolutions happening all over the place, and uh the Berlin Wall fell that fall. And during that summer, the North Koreans massed pretty much their entire military force on the DMZ, about 1.6 million troops, and were very much poised to invade with the idea that if they could just cross the border and take Seoul, the biggest city in South Korea is just 25 miles south of the border, so very close, and a city larger than New York City. Wow. Um, and and uh really the crown jewel of the whole of South Korea, and so the mill North Koreans' plan was always to come down and try to take Seoul, and this was gonna be their time to do it if they were ever gonna do it, because their their sponsor states were in crisis and crumbling, and uh so that summer was very, very tense, and we were constantly being alerted.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

And and these alerts were you know, not like be ready, but there was some some messages in those alerts that sounds like were life-changing.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Yeah, yeah. I mean, our our motto in the second ID was ready to fight tonight every day, and so no one was off duty, got off duty unless every weapon was cleaned and low ready to go, every system up and running, batteries topped off, everything ready to go at a moment's notice. And we would get these alert sirens that would blow, and we were, you know, had minutes to be heading to certain locations and loading up in vehicles or helicopters, and um and the army obviously had an incentive to not that it wasn't real, but to make it as real for you and your and your other soldiers as possible. Like we were never told these were you know practice alerts ever. Um, it was always the real thing as far as we knew, and it was pretty well known within the second ID that with the North Koreans outnumbering us, you know, 20 to 1, a 1.6 million troops against our 20,000, and the South Koreans had about 200,000 active forces. Um, we were just vastly outnumbered, and it was pretty conventional wisdom that our whole division was to be sacrificed essentially. We were not expected to make it more than about 72 hours before we would have 100% casualties.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

So, how long are you so you're on this alert where they're like at any moment this alarm can go off and you've got 72 hours to live?

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Or less. With us being the division reconnaissance, we were sort of expected to maybe make it the first 24 hours.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

How long are you in this? I don't know what you would even call it, panic state, crisis state?

SPEAKER_00 18:57

It varied from time to time. I mean, sometimes within a couple hours they would index the alert as they call it and call it off, and we would go back to bed, supposedly. But sometimes it went on for a day or more, and we would deploy further out to our strategic points and stuff, still thinking that this is all real.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Um But even then you'd wake up the next day and it could start all over again.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

Right. So yeah, and and I, you know, our commanders, and this is nothing new to us. This is, I think, something that has been talked about in militaries for ages and still to this day, that the advice of commanders to the troops is to accept your own death. Um that to be fully functional in combat and as fearless as possible and as effective as possible, you need to go into accepting your own death, accepting you're not going to survive this um or you'll be preoccupied with staying alive.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

And this is they're telling this to 18, 19, 20-year-old young men.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

How does one again I don't want to get how does one get to that? I mean, is it just they say it, you do it? Is it as simple as that? How do you get to that mindset? I mean, just thinking here as a as a privileged 55-year-old guy who's never had to confront something like that, that's a remarkable mindset.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

I wouldn't I wouldn't say it's something as much that you actively did as much as it just kind of happens, you know, especially after multiple alerts and each time kind of looking around at your friends and being like, well, this could be our last day together, you know. Um and and it just kind of sinks in and uh and it had an impact. Um and as in the years since when I've done I've done a lot of research on the effects of of military trauma and and everything, um you know, we we jokingly at the time saw these impacts on ourselves, and we coined the term pre-traumatic stress disorder, um, which actually is is very accurate and and uh something that psychological researchers have coined in in reference to troops who are on this tripwire in various contexts, who are on the edge of combat a lot, start to have impacts from it. And uh it was definitely apparent in ours.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Um how long I mean that stretch again, I know it was day-to-day. Is this a a summer, uh 90 days, 180 days?

SPEAKER_00 21:26

The entire time I was there, it was definitely very tense. But looking back on it, the most tense time was that period in the summer and fall of 89. I was there all the way through into most midway through 1990. Um it was still tense when I left. Um but but uh looking back on it that first summer I was there was was the most stressful point. Um yeah, yeah. And got out and uh came home and within weeks of Living in that environment, I was starting as a freshman in college in South Dakota.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Yeah, so I mean you go you're in high school two weeks, boom, you're in the military four years, and then two weeks after that, you're back into a college environment. That's some whiplash. Yeah, I imagine.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Yeah, it was. And uh um and it was there in that period that I think really planted the seeds for the work I ended up doing in the criminal courts with veterans because my transition back to that civilian existence was not smooth and seamless. I I was very amped up and uh um bored. Uh sure. And one of my combat veteran clients in more recent years uh defined his experience as coming back from from real war to civilian life, as he says it was like living in 1080p high definition and coming back to grainy black and white.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

And uh that's I thought was a pretty good analogy.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

And so came back and these are real, I mean, I know we'll get, but that's like there's some real chemicals that are impacting your body as a result of this. That's not just a matter of will or just acceptance.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

So I found shockingly quickly, two other veterans who had just gotten out of the military themselves who had been in similar one, was a Marine, the other was in the 82nd Airborne Division, and uh were experiencing similar adjustment issues. And we, along with some other folks uh that we were in school with, uh, fell into a group and we were wild children for a while, um drinking on Olympic levels and doing just stupid stuff that could have got us into immense amounts of trouble.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Yeah, but they're they're but uh they're but the grace of God, right? Um and you eventually found your way to law school.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Yeah, yeah. So that first couple years was rough. I I did really well in class. Um I looking back on at the military experience was very helpful in maturing me and instilling self-discipline, and I think I had a I had an insecurity complex about coming back to school. I I thought that being out of school for a few years was going to somehow prevent me from performing in that environment. And so I was very diligent about my studies. In fact, my freshman year, I outlined every single reading assignment I had. I didn't even know outlining was a thing then, like it would become in law school, but I just was like, how can I ensure I know every single reading?

SPEAKER_01 24:43

Overachieving.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Yeah, and I I worked hard but played hard and did, like I said, a lot of stupid stuff in my off time, but got good grades and found my way into various activities in school and things to channel my my energy that were productive, and one of them was debate, um, and got pretty into college debate and uh in that environment rubbed shoulders of a lot of other folks who had law school and their their sites, and that made

Discovering Criminal Defense After Service

SPEAKER_00 25:15

sense to me.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

You're good at school, I'm an intellectual, I like ideas.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

I like debating, and it it it was the thing that resonated with me probably the most of my time in in undergrad. And uh so yeah, I decided to go to law, and I and I wasn't ready to go back out into the real world yet, for sure, and staying in academics for a f for a little longer. Didn't have I didn't have any qualms about doing that. So yeah, I uh I ended up uh applying to various law schools and and ended up at the University of Minnesota.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

So you're in law school, yeah. Um do you still have some of your veteran friends there? Have you found and gravitated to them uh in that world?

SPEAKER_00 25:56

Always wherever I go, I always find the the fellow veterans, yeah. Um how does that happen? Well, you know, law school is very cloistered, so you get to know everybody pretty well and pretty quickly it's your whole entire life. And in my experience, it wasn't the the connection in that time frame, it wasn't somebody who had been in the military. Um the University of Minnesota, I wouldn't say law school was not full of military vets, but but uh one of my classmates had just come out of the CIA, had been a CIA field officer, um, Jack Rice, um, who is uh still a close friend and colleague of mine today, and uh who played a critical role in me ending up doing criminal defense, actually. Um, but once we found each other, yeah, I mean we both saw the world in similar ways and had had similar experiences far outside of the norm.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

And uh um were you a little older in your class too?

SPEAKER_00 26:54

I was gonna say we both felt like kind of old men compared to a lot of our classmates that had just come straight through high school, college, and law school.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

That was the journey I took, is just boom, boom, boom. 19 years of school in a row.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so he and I became very close over the course of law school, and and interestingly, went both of us really didn't know what we wanted to do when we grew up as lawyers, and and uh the U of M, I think, at least in that time frame, was very effective at convincing law students that going uh off to big firm law world was was the pinnacle thing to do. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

And uh that's kind of what law school is about. I mean, if you really think about it, law schools are like I don't think University of Minnesota is special on that. They're pushing lawyers to go into big law.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

And I was susceptible to that argument from the military. Uh, you know, I had I not gotten out of the military, what I had aspired to do if I was going to stay in was to go into the special forces, the Green Berets, and and uh and in fact took some steps in that direction. Um and uh some of my friends that I served with as scouts did go in that direction and and became Green Berets. And I always harbored some level of of uh doubt about not going that route, you know, and that maybe that was what I should have done kind of thing. And so when I got to law school and learned that there was this sort of what was presented as sort of a more pinnacle thing to do, I was like, well, that's you know, that's what I'll I'll focus on doing. And so I did. I I went that route and ended up getting a job at a a large corporate firm in Minneapolis. Um, and so did my friend Jack. Um and uh how'd that feel? It was terrible.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

I figured that was gonna be your answer.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

It was it was just utterly horrible. Um, and we were both of us were miserable, like really from the very beginning.

SPEAKER_01 28:51

And just for those who maybe don't, you know, don't know big law or don't know what I mean, why was it terrible? What was miserable about it? What do they what do first year lawyers in big firms end up doing? Or at least what did you?

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Nothing important or meaningful. Um I spent my third year interning at the same firm, so I had an intern experience. It wasn't bad. Um but uh once I got out and got into it as a junior associate, I was in in an employment litigation group, so we were doing uh uh employer side employment defense work, and and the partner I worked for, his specialty was sexual harassment defense.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

So you're working for the man who's working for the man.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

We're working for the man who's working for the man that's sexually harassing, yeah, the in their workplace. And and uh I just was not finding a lot of sense of purpose and meaning in that mission, to say the least. And uh my existence basically was drafting summary judgment motions in these kinds of cases and uh and other assorted stuff too, but that was a big part of what we were doing, and it just didn't speak to me. And I and and I and I would say in a larger sense, I just came to realize that that environment was not a place that I was gonna find a home, even if I was in a different practice area. And I didn't see a lot of very fulfilled, self-actualized people in that environment.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Is that something you think you were conscious of and searching for meaning at that at that stage in your life, that age in your life?

SPEAKER_00 30:30

No doubt. And and and I one of the benefits of the military, and there were a lot of downsides to my experience as well, but one of the big benefits was having a sense of purpose and mission and meaning and being part of something bigger than myself and and missing it when I didn't have it subsequently. Yeah. And it's something I see in a lot of our veteran clients that we've worked with over the years who come home from their military service often having experienced far more trauma and stuff than I did and who are struggling to reintegrate back into the civilian world. And part of it is untreated trauma, but as I found very often, the other part of it is that lack of sense of purpose and mission and meaning in life.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

And that's something we as criminal defense attorneys share with him. Yeah. Can you tell us about that?

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Yeah. Well, when I speak to criminal defense attorney groups about representing veterans, I I often note that, you know, uh though I would say that veterans are not or that there are not a ton of veterans in the criminal defense community. Um most of us uh uh you know come from more lefty sort of perspectives and are not as likely to have served in the military. But I'm always careful to point out that in my experience within the legal realm, uh the criminal defense community um and and particularly the public defender part of the criminal defense community are the closest analog subculture of the law to combat soldiers, uh combat veterans, in that they're warrior cultures that are very insular and really kind of separated counter-cultures from the rest of the mainstream world and are doing very often hard, gritty, but very important things that that uh are are defending uh you know our constitution and our system that makes our country unique. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Defending principles. Defending principles with different tools, perhaps, than the than the military, but in many ways very similar.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

And the warrior culture, that warrior ethos, that esprit de corps, that camaraderie.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Um one of the things I've heard you talk about is just the shared the commonality that our mission is misunderstood by the public.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Yeah, right? That that us as criminal defense attorneys, that I think the public often doesn't understand what we do or why we do it. That's right. Right? And it's gotta be the same in the military, especially for people now, like how could you go over there and have a gun? How could you have have done this harm or done this violence or done whatever it is, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:20

It's exactly right. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

So What are the questions? I mean, just following that theme for a second, Brock. I mean, we all you know, I know the question that people ask us in the criminal defense world because they misunderstand it, right? It's the how can you defend that person? We don't need to get into that. But is there a similar question that you find people are asking veterans along along the same moral Absolutely?

SPEAKER_00 33:47

Yeah, how could you go over there and do violence to people? And and how can you center your whole life and your job around the application of violence? You know, it is so outside of the norm of anything that exists in the civilian world, it really is its own very distinct subculture. And even within the military, there are very distinct subcultures, and the combat arms is a relatively small part of the military. Um 20% or less of the army are actual combat soldiers who are whose job is to go out and and do that mission, and everybody else are in various levels of support of that mission.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

Um many ways like criminal defense attorneys. There's m there's many criminal defense attorneys, and lots of us do work in a different way, but the front lines defending the defending the violence, defending the those in that's a smaller percentage of us.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Very much, yeah. And and so even within the military, there's this counterculture, you know, that the combat troops feel very much other than the rest. And I and that very much resonates within uh my experience of being within the criminal defense community. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

How do are there times, again, in your experience now as a criminal defense attorney, talking to the veterans, do is that something that they share or that they're just like how we share, we're just I'm if like if I have to answer that goddamn question one more time, it just uh you get dismissive answers or you have walk away answers. Is it the same for the military vet that they'll they'll have a pocket answer that'll just make somebody go away?

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Oh yeah, all the time. Yeah, yeah. Veterans coming back from their service, particularly from war service, get a lot of a lot of questions that are maybe well intentioned or uninformed, but are kind of offensive, you know. Um how many people did you kill, or and stuff like that that uh are hard to answer, you know, and and uh there's no good answer. There's no good answer and it are part of the divide that exists between returning veterans and their communities that they just fought to serve.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

Just separates them even more so, right? Right, right. I mean it's almost a uh uh poor analogy, perhaps, for me to say in any ways that I feel the same, but it feels like it's like you don't belong. The reason they're asking this question is you don't belong here, justify your existence. Tell me why you should be at this party, you should be at this dinner table, you should be in this community.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

And or you are like this alien specimen that we we uh don't know what to do with and and we're interested in poking and prodding it and trying to figure it out a little bit for you know just for curiosity's sake.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

Yeah. Yeah, you're you're there you're objectified because you're not you're otherized. Yeah, you're not a real person here. Let me just yeah. So you're you're in this unfulfilling, unmeaningful job, and uh I heard a story about you uh going up north in wonderful northern Wisconsin and on a kayak trip and you maybe got diverted. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Well, so yeah, that was a little bit further. I and I'll and I'll get to that. That that was a pivotal moment in my life. But so here's Jack and I both working at this large firm in downtown Minneapolis, miserable beyond belief, uh trying to figure out what we were gonna do. And he was the first to jump. He he uh had an opportunity come up, and I don't know how it came, but a job, uh, a temporary job as a contract prosecutor in uh Scott County, Minnesota. And very quickly was reporting back, you know, this is this is fun. This is and he I remember getting together with him and him saying, you know, this is this is it. I don't want to do prosecution, but when this contract's up, I think I'm just gonna hang out of shingle and do criminal defense work. And I was like, wow, that's a really bold, you know, okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

Yeah, yeah, you gotta I mean the the your job is not maybe meaningful and fulfilling, but it's a guaranteed paycheck.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Yeah, it's a paycheck, right? Yeah. And I'm like, and how are you going to make a living doing this again? And and uh, but I was so miserable at that point that I was just getting ready to quit law altogether. And Jack's message was, well, if you're ready to just quit altogether, what do you have to lose? And I was like, point. So yeah, I I uh I left the firm and hung out of shingle and and got a part-time public defender gig and uh and started that whole journey. I had in this context squandered my law school time. I had I had taken criminal and criminal procedure, but I had not done clinics, I hadn't done anything to really prepare for this. And so there was a lot of catch-up to do and uh a lot of faking it till you make it type of situation.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

Um But it's very it's a you know, you're behind the scenes at the big firm, you're not having direct contact with any clients, it's all this abstract, you know, producing papers, and now all of a sudden a human being comes in your office and says, Help me. Yep. How how did you become a helper?

SPEAKER_00 39:14

I quickly found that that just felt right. And and in this regard, I also came to realize my time in the military as a low-ranking enlisted man in a combat unit had prepared me for this well because I had spent those years bonding deeply with people from all walks of life, all races, ethnic backgrounds, geographical, socioeconomic, and I knew what their worlds looked like. You know, I my my unit, you know, I had African Americans from South Central LA and Detroit, and you know uh uh rural uh white guys from the South who, you know, had been involved in the KKK and everything in between, you know, and and had not just been exposed to them, but had gotten to know them all very, very deeply, you know. And and so a guy named Mark Hull became one of my closest friends in the army, and Mark grew up in South Central Los Angeles um in the late 80s, uh, at the height of the violence and the crips and the bloods in that whole world. And he and I were roommates in the army and got to be extremely close. And uh I think got both of us got very deep educations from each other. You know, he had had very little interaction with white people, especially people from South Dakota, which he couldn't even conceive of what South Dakota was like, and I similarly had no idea what it was like to grow up in South Central LA. And uh it was it was a huge learning experience that that I still look back on to this day, I'm still in contact with him. Yeah um and uh it was just a world-broadening thing for me, and and uh learning what the world looked like from his point of view and others uh who had had that similar experience uh still to this day informs my perception of a lot of the stuff my clients have gone through, you know.

Connecting PTSD to Criminal Behavior

SPEAKER_01 41:23

Sure. So you're uh throw out the shingle, you have this skill set that you've developed over the past, you know, five to ten years.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

So back to the anecdote you were you're referring to. So as a public defender and and uh um uh young criminal defense lawyer, I quickly picked up on how many veterans were coming through the criminal courts. And and they were mostly Vietnam veterans at that time in the late 90s, and many of them I came to realize had been cycling through the justice system on a regular basis ever since they'd come home from Vietnam. And I remember thinking, well, you know, I had a bumpy go of it coming back from my service and I didn't even see direct combat. So I can only guess, you know, how impacted they were by this, and it was just intuitive, it just felt obvious. And and uh, but then yeah, one day I I got one of the outlets that I found to keep myself out of trouble for my need of for adventure and excitement was I took up sea kayaking up on Lake Superior in the 90s and as I was getting out of law school and got pretty heavily into it. And uh um I was on a trip up in the Apostle Islands um early spring. And this would have been I think in 2000. Um and it was it was one of those cold, miserable, rainy weekends that that uh we went out, we got out to the first islands, and it was just miserable and cold and windy, and and uh we decided to just bail out and we we paddled back in and ended up uh in Ashland at a a used bookstore coffee shop there. And I was looking in the shelves and found uh uh a book by a guy named Dr. Jonathan Shea called Achilles in Vietnam. And Dr. Shea is a retired VA psychiatrist who had spent a career treating Vietnam veterans, and he was also uh a student of the classics. And he wrote this book about that drew direct correlations between the characters in in Homer's Iliad and all of the trauma and stuff that they experienced in the Trojan War to the Vietnam vets that he had been treating. And with this thesis that, you know, although war has changed over 3,000 years dramatically, the experiences and the impacts on the individual warriors out fighting and dying um hasn't changed really at all. And and the the trauma that his Vietnam Non-veterans experience was mirrored very much in these ancient texts. And I stood in the bookstore and and I don't think I moved from that spot for a couple hours. I probably read the first two or three chapters just standing there transfixed. And it was just all of this stuff was rushing through my mind and and uh epiphanies going off all over the place. And I wandered over and bought the book and bought more coffee and sat there and read most of the book that day, just sitting there.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

What were some of the early epiphanies that, if you can recall? I mean, I know it's hard to now you've got all these connections, but what was what was hitting you then?

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Just just this this what I was seeing with those Vietnam vets that I was working with in the courts, I'm just coming to realize this is age-old stuff. This has been every war that's ever been fought. There have been those who have brought their war home with them and uh um have struggled with life thereafter, and that it just all was sort of gelling here. And and I was thinking about the Vietnam vets that I had personally worked with and the stories I had learned from them, and it was just it was just all clicked, like everything kind of snapped into focus, you know. And and then, of course, only a year or so later, 9-11 happened, and we're off to yet another new war.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

At that point, um had you I I know you you read a lot, right? And I know you've uh in 1990 a Minneapolis native Tim O'Brien wrote a a wonderful famous book called Uh The Things They Carried. Had you had you been in contact with that already? Yes, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:40

I yeah, I read a lot and I've read a lot of military-related books over time, both both fiction and non-fiction, and and Tim O'Brien's book was definitely one of the more profound books that I'd come across.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

I remember I have a quote written up here, and so it's you know, they carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

SPEAKER_02 46:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:05

Um tell me a little bit more about um how combat contributes to crime and how soldiers come home different.

SPEAKER_00 46:15

The infliction of violence on other people profoundly changes people. And and even the preparation and the psychological conditioning that it takes to prepare normal young people to do those terrible things has profound impacts on them even if they don't ever do them, I think. Um but particularly if they do. And and uh it's uh it's dehumanizing, you know, um, and uh it changes one's perception of who they are um and and uh how they fit into society or don't fit into society when they come back. And one one I've had m countless conversations about this over the years with all of my veteran clients, but one that always stands out to me in this context is a a guy flashing forward a decade, you know, into my practice, uh a young guy who had come back from he had done three combat deployments in Iraq as a Marine, um, first machine gunner and then ultimately a sniper. And he was so young looking still. He was in his mid-20s, I guess, at this time that I was representing him, and he had kind of an Opie Taylor sort of, you know, uh ginger uh freckled redhead guy, but he and he looked like he could have been 16 years old still, except his eyes were like an old man. And and he had come home and within a year had racked up three DWIs and was facing mounting punishments, and and uh so I had the conversation with him that I have with many of my veteran, well all my veteran clients that come in is that you know, there's no shame in having been impacted by your service. Veterans throughout the ages have come back and struggled with these things. There's no shame in getting help. If you go get some help that I'm gonna help you get connected with, I think we can hopefully convince the prosecutor to not use the most blunt instruments of the justice system on you. And and of course, this was back before veterans' courts and any things like that. This is all just persuading judges and prosecutors to do something different. But he heard me out and he just wasn't seeing he didn't seem too engaged with the pitch I was giving him, and he politely sat there and listened, but he just had this distant look in his eye, and it I I I kind of tapered off and I just said, I I'm talking a lot, and I'm not sure if any of this is landing, you know. How tell me what you're thinking about, and he said, Well, sir, I will uh I'll go get help. I'll I'll I'll do what you're talking about. This it makes sense, but uh he said, uh I've killed more people than any serial killer I've ever heard about, and I don't know if I'm ever gonna be normal again.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

Yeah, because we we think about trauma, at least I have, I shouldn't impose it upon everybody, about the trauma that happens to people. But here, this is somebody that our government has put him in a position and asked him to do acts, and his own actions have has caused this trauma, which is it's for somebody not in there that's not experienced with it, it's a it's to deal with that on my side that there's so much blame and hurt and other things that come up with that that it's hard to hard to get to, hard to understand. Um I imagine that's a huge part of the work that you're doing is to get those people that haven't been there to understand that.

SPEAKER_00 50:01

They don't know what they don't know. And when you're dealing with prosecutors and judges, especially those who've done the job for a long time, they really think they do know at all and they've seen it all. And and uh and in fact, I had another very pivotal conversation in my career related to that same case, that same client. Uh find myself not long after having that conversation with that veteran, arguing with the prosecutor in the case. And again, this was a DWI, this wasn't a murder case, he hadn't done anything violent yet. Um a third DWI in Minnesota carries a mandatory jail term and and all of this, and I'm arguing, give him a chance to get some help. Let's stay the jail time and and see how he does. And and uh she wasn't buying it. And and I I started talking about all the stuff he had been through, three combat tours. It was an incredible amount of direct combat, fought in some of the more intense battles in Iraq, lost tons of friends, um lots of things, and he was struggling, and I could see he was in a downward spiral, and he was heading to much darker things than just DWIs, and and uh she cuts me off as I'm trying to convey all of this to her, and she just says, Yeah, yeah, everybody has a sad story to tell. And that made me angry, and and and uh and she then goes on to say, Your client is dangerous, and he needs to go to jail for 90 days. Like that's going to solve all of this, right? And I and I I kind of snapped and I and I, without really thinking too deeply about it, I said, with all due respect, I don't think you have any idea how dangerous my client is. And then I was like, oh, you know, maybe not the best thing for a criminal defense lawyer to say about their client, right? Um but there's in hindsight, it was exactly the thing to say, and I've said it in various forms countless times since then, because it's true. And and in this particular context, these are folks who absolutely are outsized risk to public safety if they're not doing well, because the government has trained them to use lethal violence in a way that regular civilians are never exposed to. And have no concept of no concept of. And that's not to say all veterans coming home are are are dangerous. Most come back and are managing their military service experience and are and are wiser and stronger, faster, smarter, and and immediate assets to their communities. But for

Public Safety & Our Moral Duty to Care

SPEAKER_00 52:45

those who are coming home and bringing that war home with them and are struggling with that, and struggling with untreated trauma and often self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, they are absolutely outsized risk to public safety. And and uh it's one of the imperatives beyond just doing the right thing for the veterans who served and sacrificed on our behalf, that that I think drives this, is there's a public safety imperative to this. Um and not just a moral one, but just a pragmatic one there. That uh we need to take advantage of the crisis presented by a veteran falling into the justice system and see that crisis as an opportunity to get them help that prevents them from continuing to offend and potentially offend in much more serious ways against their community.

SPEAKER_01 53:38

So that there's a lot there I want to unpack. You know, the whole idea of 90 days that's gonna protect our community. Tell us a little bit more about that. I mean, the you know, this idea that that that short-term incarceration modifies behavior.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

I it just doesn't tend to make people better. Um and and for a veteran who's already struggling with significant trauma to throw them in a cage and back into what they often and often rightfully perceive as a hostile environment is actually counterproductive. Sure. Um it's putting them back into a combat zone from their perspective. And very often they come out worse off than they went in and heading in a worse direction than they were before.

SPEAKER_01 54:28

Um And why do we why do you maybe you already answered it, but you know, when when why that happens is it just seems like it's it's more isolation, it's more alienation, it's more you don't belong.

SPEAKER_00 54:41

And danger, you know. Uh you know, there's there's the possibility of violence when you're incarcerated from other inmates.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

And um then you just spiral because now you're in an intense situation where you don't feel safe.

SPEAKER_00 54:55

Back in a hostile environment.

SPEAKER_01 54:57

And then it just goes from there. Right. As opposed to, you know, you talk about what what's the what's the science, what's the research behind therapeutic interventions and helping public safety, as opposed to incapacitation or incarceration, putting somebody in a cage?

SPEAKER_00 55:16

It's it's to address the underlying issues that are driving the criminal behavior. When there's an identified mental health or substance abuse issue that we can say this is what's the driving factor, it it makes more sense to address those underlying issues in a fundamental way than to just punish the symptoms uh that come out of it. Um there's also a philosophical aspect to it that I've come to recognize that uh veterans, and I I think anybody who is ultimately sent off to jail is a sense of abandonment, of being discarded by society and thrown away. And that hits particularly hard for veterans who've just risked their lives for that very society who they now see as turning its back on them and abandoning them. And it it adds to that that gulf between them and the society and their communities and and uh leads to greater levels of cynicism and hopelessness that they're ever gonna really reintegrate.

SPEAKER_01 56:21

Yeah. What and maybe this is tied to what you're saying as well. You know, we as a community are I didn't vote for war, but I'm a part of a community that has sent somebody out for war. Somebody else is out there doing it. No, no sacrifice on my part, you know, no real service at my part. Um what moral duty? I mean, just is do you think we as a community, we as a society have some sort of moral duty to those that we send out to to do our dirty work?

SPEAKER_00 56:56

We absolutely have one as a society, and and I think it's even more profound in the criminal justice system when a veteran comes home and brings that war home with them in all too predictable ways and falls into the justice system, they're now you know standing in judgment from the very government that sent them off to fight and and and who elected to start the war and deploy them. And and uh there's actually scholarship on this, uh, a law review article that we cite in our book, and and I frequently bring up I believe the author's Young Hu Lee writes this very philosophically based law review article that basically makes this the argument that the government lacks full legal standing in prosecuting combat veterans for crimes committed as a result of their of their service-related conditions. And and uh not all legal standing, but but that legal standing is impacted by the government's own involvement in creating the problem that is now you know at issue in the criminal court. And and we've made that argument to prosecutors and judges, uh, and ultimately to legislators, we'll get to that later, that that in standing in judgment of this veteran, and I'll say this to the prosecutor or the judge, you prosecutor or judge may not have been the one to start that war or to deploy this veteran off to it, but in prosecuting them or judging them in this case, you represent the government that did. And you have to take that into account in the way that you look at how to deal with this case.

SPEAKER_01 58:49

If you're gonna speak for or literally represent that entity, which is in this case the government, I think for your for your sentence, for your judgment to be accepted, there has to be an acknowledgement of that truth. Right. Right? Um one of the articles that you you wrote uh and I read uh you quote uh from a veteran George Hill that talks about PTSD. Do you remember that quote?

SPEAKER_00 59:18

Yeah. PTSD is a name drained of poetry and blame, he says, and he he preferred the Civil War term for what we call post-traumatic stress now as uh was soldier's heart.

SPEAKER_02 59:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 59:31

An irritable heart. Um and in his his uh quote, he says uh that term connotates a disorder of warriors, not men who were weak or cowardly, but who at a young age put their feelings aside and performed unimaginable tasks.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

And then that quote where he says it's you know drained of of uh poetry and blame, you know.

SPEAKER_02 59:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:58

The blame is is outward as well. I think that's what we're talking about here, right? The blame is not just to the person who is now suffering from the PTSD. There's I have some blame in that.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:10

The whole society that sent them.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:12

And the whole society that benefited from their sacrifices.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

Yeah. Do you find those audiences, the the the representatives of the government to be receptive of of of that, of accepting some of that accountability?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:29

They don't tend to take it well in the moment.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:33

Because it's it's pretty provocative, right? Um, but I do think it lands ultimately. Um and and uh um I do think it has it has the desired effect.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:47

Yeah. I think I was telling you before we we started recording this morning, I had the wonderful opportunity to listen to a podcast by uh an attorney I deeply admire, Brian Stevenson. He wrote uh the book Just Mercy his memoir, and he's been in front of the United States Supreme Court, he's doing all this advocate, wonderful advocacy. But he's um this morning, and when I heard it this morning on Fresh Air, uh he said, When you tell the truth about the harm, then you think differently about the remedy. And and there was something about that quote that reminded me of George Hill. Yeah. You know, we have poetry and blame in his, and we have truth and harm with Brian Stevenson, and you need all of that to get to the remedy. Is that that's essentially what you're saying with veterans?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:33

100%. Yeah. We have to be honest with ourselves about why the veterans who are falling into the system are falling into the system and the role that our society played in it in order to find our way to the solution. And and ultimately that solution is to help our troubled warriors heal from the injuries they suffered on our behalf and to embrace them and bring them back into the communities they served.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:03

Yeah.

Changing Legislation for Veteran Sentencing

SPEAKER_01 1:02:05

So if I can you're back in that bookstore. Yeah. Right? You're you're reading uh Achilles in Vietnam by Dr. Shea. Yeah. Um that's a springboard for the the all of the work that you've been doing. Can you take us on to that? What's the what are the steps that you go from there?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

Well, the next big one was 9-11, 2001, right? And everybody remembers where they were that day. And and I was in my apartment in Minneapolis getting ready to go to court when I turned on the TV and saw the first tower burning, watched the second tower hit, was just leaving for court as they started to fall. Um went to court that day in St. Paul. It was interesting. There were six judges from Russia visiting the St. Paul criminal courts that day, which is very surreal. Never saw it before or since, but they were obviously tripping. Everybody was. Um and uh and then that afternoon, I got together with my friend Jack Rice, who had served in the CIA and who was also a criminal defense attorney at that time, and we were officing together and all that, and uh we were having drinks and trying to process what had happened, and we had a lot of broad-ranging conversation that day. But one of the things I remember clearly saying is, you know, we're about to go to war like we haven't since Vietnam. And we're about to deploy a whole bunch of folks over there to fight and sacrifice in a way we haven't seen in decades. And it's probably not gonna be long before we start seeing them coming back with post-traumatic stress issues and landing in the criminal court system. And who knew at that moment how what we were about to embark on and how long it was gonna go and how deeply it was gonna impact our country and and my life and my career for that matter. But but uh that was one of those points of realization of what was to come, I guess. And and it wasn't long after. Um, my first veteran client of the war on the global war on terror, as it would come to be called, was uh a Green Beret who was part of the initial invasion of Afghanistan and returned home. Um to uh he he and his wife had grown up in Minnesota and she had returned to Minnesota while he was deployed, and he came back and uh found that she had been unfaithful to him. Classic uh Homer uh you know, the Odyssey kind of thing. And and uh he committed an act of domestic violence against her that landed him in the criminal courts in Washington County, right across the river. And uh so he was the first of what would become many, many, many veterans of that war who would uh be coming back in the years ahead and found a profound impact on my whole life and career path. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:00

How does it how does it come to be that they so many of them find their way to your office? Is that just organically?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:08

Yeah, yeah, initially. I you know, there was wasn't a lot of people doing this kind of thing, and within the metri veterans community were got out, and so they were showing up, and and I'd already been working with Vietnam vets and stuff, and so it it just was word of mouth. It was a slow trickle that grew into a flow and then a deluge as the wars both you know in Iraq and Afghanistan built steam.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:33

And then uh you're the you're the editor along with uh Brian Elsie of Defending Veterans in Criminal Court. When did that when did that come about?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:44

A decade or so into that journey. Um we had really started as the war in Iraq reached a crescendo in 06, 07, 08. We were just seeing a huge flow of veterans coming home and fresh off the battlefield and uh And Ryan came r towards the latter part of that decade in like two thousand nine is when I think he first popped up into my life. He was a law student at the time who was he's a decade younger than me, and so he was part of that generation and he had deployed and had come back and was struggling and ultimately went to law school and uh saw me do a presentation about this stuff and volunteered a summer and and never left. Um but uh I had gotten involved. I was involved in the Minnesota Criminal Defense Attorneys Association and was the legislative chair during that interim. And in 2007, we decided to follow California's lead in passing uh uh our first veteran sentencing statute in Minnesota. Um pretty humble statute. It really didn't do much by the time the prosecutors got done stripping all the good stuff out at the legislature. But in 2009, um the following year, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Porter v. McCullum, the the first and only time they've addressed combat trauma and criminal sentencing. And they overturned the death penalty of a Korean War veteran because his his defense attorney at trial had failed to bring any of his military service experience into either the trial or the sentencing phase. And uh in the heart of their opinion, they cited to Minnesota and California's recently passed sentencing statutes. And so that triggered a lot of things. Um, and and this advocacy that we had been doing kind of informally at that time started to become more formalized because we were getting contacted by people around the country interested in similar legislation and started traveling and speaking and stuff around the country more and more. And then in 2010, we were contacted by an organization called the National Veterans Foundation that that uh had put out a book a generation before for criminal defense lawyers on how to defend Vietnam veterans. Okay. And we had that book on our shelf along with with others, uh with Dr. Shea's books and everybody. And uh here was the folks who put out that book asking us if we would do an updated version of it. And um we had no idea what we were about to get ourselves into, and if we hadn't we probably wouldn't have done it, but it ended up being a four-year all-consuming project. And what was going to be a 200-page book grew to a 700-page tome in which we made contact and relationships with some of the top experts in the in the the field of veterans in the criminal justice system around the country, including Dr. Shea. Yeah. Um got to meet him? Oh, yeah, yeah. That was so cool. And and many others uh of our heroes from the books on our shelves that we convinced to contribute chapters from their kind of particular areas of expertise. And then we wrote several chapters ourselves and and put this thing together, but it became like this all-consuming thing to channel all of this information that we had accumulated and distill it into something that we could give to attorneys to help veterans uh that uh because we couldn't, we were realizing represent them all.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:21

Yeah. Well, it's on my shelf there behind you. It's it's well well worn and marked up, and it's definitely uh very thankful to have it to help some of some of my clients who were veterans. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So

A New Generation of Veterans & Incentivizing their Recovery

SPEAKER_01 1:09:36

I want to uh talk a little bit about this generation of veterans. Um, obviously, we've had veterans, you know, throughout the history of time since since the the Iliad, but this current generation of American veterans, tell me about them.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:53

They are incredibly unique in our history, and I would say in the history of most countries. This has become our longest serving generation of combat veterans. They fought our two longest wars in American history simultaneously. They fought it without a our nation never had a draft in these conflicts, and so though our our militaries have been relatively small uh uh given the scale of these conflicts, and we've we've sustained them by redeploying the same troops back again and again in a way we simply never did before. Um vast majority of Vietnam veterans, as I often point out, and the numbers are hazy, but probably 90% served one tour in Vietnam. Um a few went back for a second or third time, but they were a relatively small minority. You contrast that to today, um the veterans of the GWAT, as we call it, uh two and three tours are the norm, uh, more than half the force deployed two or more times. And and uh and we have many veterans who've served many more than that. Our our current record in our practice is somebody who did 13 combat deployments. We have another who did 12 uh and and several more right behind them. And and they they're always those who've deployed that much are always the most humble in my experience and and are quick to point out that they're nothing special in that regard. Uh that uh in the special operations world where where they came from, they have friends still serving that are now up over 20 combat deployments post-9-11. And uh the accumulated level of trauma that those folks are bringing home with them is hard to wrap your head around.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:43

And if you can contrast their service and sacrifice in a war which we don't have a draft compared to Americans' service and sacrifice, how would you how would you tell us about that?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:56

That's part of the divide, right, between us and and them that that concerns me, you know, greatly. That there's this divide between, I think, all generations of war veterans and the communities that they served. But this one, it's particular particularly stark. And and uh the veterans who I work with in my practice on a regular basis, we see this very clearly with them, that they've come home, they brought their war home with them, they're not reintegrating back in. They feel that gulf very, very strongly. And while the American public is not hostile towards them the way they were after the Vietnam War, you know, you're not seeing veterans of these conflicts getting spit on and called baby killers like Vietnam veterans were famously uh treated. Um they're they're nonetheless othered, and and it's more that they're invisible, that uh that no one knows, no one cares, and no one's really paying attention to what they saw and did and experienced on our behalf. And there's a piece of graffiti from the Iraq War that I often cite in this regard, uh, that was painted by some anonymous Marine on a concrete blast wall in Ramadi, Iraq, at the the height of the violence there. And it said uh uh the US is not at war, or America is not at war, the U.S. Marine Corps is at war. America is at the mall. And that is a sentiment that I have heard countless times from veterans in one way or another, that they they have a chip on their shoulder because we sent them over to do these things on our behalf, and we don't really have any sense of what we've asked them to do, and we're not paying attention, and we're at the mall.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

One of my favorite songs is by the Lumineers, and there's a great line in there that says, the opposite of love is indifference. You know, and and and that's what it sounds like we're talking about here is they're invisible, we're indifferent to them, and that in many ways is maybe more hurtful than hate.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:06

I think so. Yeah. And and then when that veteran acts out and lands in the justice system, that gulf grows further, and and many of them feel as if they've already been abandoned by the government and sent them to war, abandoned by the society that they returned to, and now they're about to be judged by that same country and and society and discarded. That's how they that's what they're bracing for.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:36

And they get into warrior mode.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:38

They're in warrior mode and they're just ready to, you know, get dumped on and and discarded. And and uh and if the justice system then goes forward and does as the justice system all too often does, and it does discard them, um that gulf is often unbreachable or un unbridgeable. Um so we've got this crisis that then presents an opportunity that if you can say, What if we don't discard you? What if we recognize your service and sacrifice on our behalf? And what if we give you a path to redemption that requires you to take some account full accountability of yourself, not just some, to you know, own your stuff and but go and get the help for it that that we can line up for you, um, we'll give you a path to redemption. Um I've often come to see this as as if we're uh we're dealing with veterans who've come home and brought their war home with them and gone to war against their communities, and we're trying to broker priest treaties with them one at a time.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:49

Lay down your arms, and we will give you a path back into the fold.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:55

But it you you use the term accountability. Yeah, I imagine you use that term accountability very different than the prosecutor across the table who wants 90 days in jail. Right. Tell me about what accountability means in your world, not just pure punishment.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:12

Accountability is a veteran taking responsibility and recognizing they have agency over their actions and that that they are making choices that are contributing to the problems they're in, and that uh they need to take responsibility for that part of it and and recognize that they're not a victim 100% in this. They're impacted, but they they have a role to play in this. And this isn't just about them sitting back while everybody else does the work. They they've got to do the work.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:40

And that's part of it, is right? I mean, accountability means they have to do the work. Yeah. And if they're sitting in a cage, they can't do the work.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:48

Yeah. And you know, one of the analogies I frequently use with clients who are down in a deep dark hole in life is to say, I can't carry you back up out of the hole you're in, but I can walk alongside with you and help light the path up out of this hole, but you're gonna have to shoulder the rucksack and carry it up and get you get yourself out of this. And I'll walk shoulder to shoulder with you, but you're gonna have to be doing the work. You know, only you can do the work ultimately. Yeah. And the work in this context is important to understand. There's lots of trauma therapies out there, and we have become better and better at it in the last 20 years of these wars at figuring out what works. There isn't one approach for every veteran, but there generally is an approach that will, you know, some approach that will work for nearly everyone. But all of it requires a lot of work and trauma, you know. It it involves stabilizing the patient, but then having them start to process these unprocessed traumatic memories in the form of you know talking about them and processing this unprocessed data. And and that process is traumatic, yeah. And and if left to their own devices, they would rather sit in their basement and drink Jack Daniels. It's hard to confront these terrible experiences that they went through. But and this is a quick aside, the best way to think about this that I've ever heard came from a VA psychologist who was a Vietnam veteran, and he said, the way I think about it, and I tell my patients about it, is that the brain is a computer, it's an organic computer. And and he said, when you get uh somebody who's experienced severe trauma, it's like they've had a massive input of data that is too much for their processor to manage. It overrides their RAM, the motherboard seizes up, and all that unprocessed traumatic data goes on to an auxiliary hard drive, and then it keeps rebooting back up to the motherboard over and over and over again, trying to process these unprocessed data, but it keeps doing it in these huge chunks that continue to override the system. And that is the intrusive memories, and that's the PTSD that will persist forever and lesser until uh addressed. And the way to address it in this analogy is that we stabilize the system and then we bring up discrete packets of that unprocessed data to process it a little bit at a time, and take that data and put it on the shelf with all the rest of the data on the main hard drive of life experiences until there isn't anything left that keeps rebooting. And and uh that makes so much sense to me once I started to realize that. And but it's it's hard, it's heavy lifting, and and ideally you need to incentivize veterans to be willing to do it. If they're faced with just going to do this trauma therapy or going to sit in a cage for 90 days, many will choose the cage. In some ways, it's easier. It's easier. And and so that's where the advocacy comes in that if we're gonna do this and do a therapeutic intervention, there needs to be a carrot, not just a stick. There needs to be an incentive, and that incentive takes the form of an opportunity to avoid a criminal conviction, if possible, and in more serious offenses where it's not to avoid the prison or jail time that would be attached, um, but to maximally, to the extent possible, incentivize that veteran to walk this road, and and to have and to have a goal at the end of that road that's worthwhile, and that is to rejoin the community and and and be an asset to the community and not just an ongoing liability. But as we often point out, a criminal conviction in the 21st century is the modern-day scarlet letter that will follow you around and make it even more impossible to ever reintegrate back into that community.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:47

It's more uh more alienation, more isolation, less than permanent second-class citizenship, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:53

Um, so that's the advocacy that that uh that you know we've done on a case-by-case basis over the years that's gotten into the legislation that we've worked to pass, the veterans treatment courts that we can talk about separately, generally offer some level of legal incentive uh uh for the veterans to participate. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:16

If you're enjoying this episode so far and you want to learn more, check out Brock's book, The Attorney's Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court. It's a step-by-step guide to better defending veterans. It starts with general information about combat, discusses moral injury and PTSD, how to approach the attorney-client relationship, and includes specific legal strategies for defending veterans in every point of a case. This book helped me divert two of my clients from prison to mental health treatment. It gave me the courage to ask those in power to do more than merely say, thank you for your service, and the confidence to challenge them to accept their moral duty to take care of our veterans who work to protect us. I highly recommend go check it out. There was a painting that I'd heard you talk

Statutes as Sanctuary

SPEAKER_01 1:22:10

about. Yeah. Uh law versus mob rule. Can you tell us a little bit about that that painting? Do you remember that painting?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:15

Oh, yeah, very much. And you know, and when I when I first saw the title of of your podcast, Sanctuary in the Jungle, and understood the the reference, that's the first thing that jumped to my mind is that painting. And when I first encountered that painting, it was just across the river in the old Stillwater courthouse. Um, and uh I came to learn the original is uh a mural on a wall at a uh a big court building in Washington, DC, and it's a depression era painting that depicts uh uh a judge standing on the courthouse steps with a a beaten and and uh uh weary uh person who's crawled up on the courthouse steps seeking refuge from a lynch mob. And the judge is standing out there shielding this person from the mob and raising a hand and sort of holding them at bay. Um and uh I I think it just perfectly symbolizes this concept of sanctuary in the jungle that the criminal justice system provides us, uh, and and more importantly, the the criminally accused from the from the mob from the jungle.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:35

And oftentimes we as criminal defense attorneys like to think of ourselves as the the person standing at the gate, but um maybe if it's run perfectly, there's the judges are at the door. The judges are at the gate, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:47

And the prosecutor for that matter, if they if they're really doing their job right.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:52

Um You wrote a you wrote a you helped to do some legislation in 2021. Yeah. And uh tell us about that and tell us how you structured it in a way that that talked about this role, the special role that judges can play, both against the mob, but in your in your legislation.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:12

Yeah. So the 2021 legislation we passed in Minnesota is called the Veterans Restorative Justice Act, and it's it's basically version 2.0 of our original legislation. And this time we came in a much more organized and and we were able to keep all the cool stuff in that got stripped out the first time around. And in the intervening years, we we had the advent of the Veterans Court movement that sprung up right around that that 2009 timeframe in Buffalo, New York, and spread across the country, and we we jumped on that bandwagon very quickly. And and uh Ryan and I worked with with uh folks in the Minnesota courts to set up the first Veterans Court in Hennepin County in 2009 and 10, um, and and helped set up many more in the years since. But in that decade of veterans courts evolving, both in Minnesota and across the country, the tradition in the veterans courts is the prosecutor is the gatekeeper for who gets into the veterans court. And we found over time that that created a lot of problems and disparities because the prosecutor standards by which somebody could get into their court vary dramatically from court to court and even prosecutor to prosecutor within a single jurisdiction. Sure. And it varied over time. There might be a county attorney who was really on board with this, and then they retire or don't get re-elected, and a new one comes in, and it's a whole you gotta start all over again.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:43

So if everybody in the old world, if the if the uh veteran was on board for it, the the judge was on board for it, the in many ways the prosecutor could just veto it and say nope.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:56

And and they regularly would. And and they would also vary dramatically in what kind of legal incentive they were willing to offer in the better situations and the better courts, in our perspective. The prosecutors were more open in allowing veterans with more serious offenses into the court and were also more willing to give them significant legal breaks as part of the process if the veteran did everything asked of them. But it was not uniform to say the least, and there were prosecutors who were extremely uh selective in who they would let in, often cherry-picking very low-level cases, veterans who really were not doing that badly. Um, or and there were prosecutors who would still convict them of their crimes, even if they did everything asked. So there was very little legal incentive there. And those courts we found often struggled to find enough veterans because they just weren't providing enough of a carrot to even make it worth their while to go do that tough therapy and accountability we talked about. Um, and this wasn't just Minnesota, this was across the country. Um every state that has veterans courts sees these same disparities from court to court, and and and there are also the majority of jurisdictions who never got a veterans court. And so the the type of opportunity for justice that veterans getting were dramatically different depending on where they happen to commit their offense. And so in 20, in 2017 in Minnesota, this crisis really reached a crescendo because the state public defenders, frustrated with all of these dynamics, pulled their public defenders out of the existing veterans' courts. There was a funding crunch, and the state public defender just is like, you know, we've got other things that we can focus our limited resources on, and unless or until the courts start to, you know, uh address these issues, we're just gonna take our ball and go home. And this was a huge crisis. For Ryan and I in the Veterans Defense Project, because our vision was some form of veterans court opportunity in every jurisdiction in Minnesota and across the country, and this was a big, big setback. So we went to the legislature and sought and received a grant and spent the next couple of years putting together and helping run a working group of key stakeholders, key county attorneys, and judges, and other folks from the justice system and the VA to figure out how we could do better by Minnesota veterans. And in doing so, we decided an updated statute was the best vehicle to do it. And key in that was to set up a sentencing mechanism that would apply in every jurisdiction, whether they had a vet court or not. It would put the decision-making power in the hands of the judge, not the prosecutor, and it would set up a process that a veteran would go through for a judge to consider whether they would be eligible here. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:59

And when you say decision, sorry to interrupt, but when you say decision-making process, obviously most people think judges have decision-making process all the time. How is it different? Tell us in the particular, how is it different here in this statute?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:12

Well, in Minnesota, judges do not, with very few exceptions, have the ability to grant a staid conviction, for instance, unless the prosecutor is on board with it. So they can't give that veteran the pa the opportunity to avoid a criminal conviction. I think it played a role in my offense, and the burden is on the veteran and their attorney to bring forth the evidence to support this prospect. The prosecutor has an opportunity to object, and there's even a mechanism for a contested hearing as to whether or not the veteran meets the criteria, but ultimately the judge is the decider. And if the judge decides that the veteran meets the criteria, then the veteran is given an opportunity to take accountability, go get the help they need, and is offered some form of legal benefit.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:18

It's like a sentencing hearing pre-charging almost.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:21

Right. Yeah. Well, it or or certainly pre-plea. Okay. So this eligibility happens pre-ple. Ultimately, we introduced the stat the bill. It took us a couple years to get everybody on board with it because it was a pretty dramatic departure from the status quo.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:37

Oh, absolutely. I mean it really changes the roles within the I mean, the judge now moves moves forward with taking away the discretion from the executive branch.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:47

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:48

It's also, I I think for those that don't necessarily work every day in the law, it's it's remarkable. And it's also remarkable the fact that the simplicity of it is basically we're gonna give the judge the power to consider this person's life and making decisions about this person's life.

unknown 1:31:09

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:09

Right? I mean, right now in Wisconsin, uh I have a case uh that's in maybe gonna go to the in front of the Supreme Court, but I represent somebody who's accused of doing something when they were ten. And the and the Court of Appeals just said, yeah, you need to consider the fact that the person was ten. You know, let's treat kids like kids. And that's like a major change in the law.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:36

Right? And that's some of the things that you're doing, is which if we think about the law, right? I mean, we the fairness of it, sometimes it's obvious to you, it's obvious to me, but that's not the way the law is written. You have to go out and do the work, you have to do the grind, you have to get these committees, you have to convince these stakeholders, you have to get the people in power to do things that might be as simple as like, hey, let's give the person in charge some power to consider the humanity of the person they're in front of.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:07

Yeah. And and I've learned over the years that the legislative process, it it's different in many ways than than doing criminal defense work, but there are so many similarities too, and it's all about persuasion. Yeah. And it's just a different kind of jury, you know, and and I've had the immense uh uh uh fortune to marry a woman who that's what she does uh full-time as legislative advocacy, my wife Sarah, and she in fact we met through doing criminal justice reform at the Minnesota legislature, and she spent most of her adult life doing criminal justice reform and uh um and now works on election reform. But uh I, you know, we're very kindred spirits, uh, very overlapping skill sets, um, and and uh I've learned a ton about taking the skills I learned in the courts and applying them in this different context. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:09

Well, this has been

What Fuels your Heart?

SPEAKER_01 1:33:10

fantastic, Brock. I really appreciate your your coming in here and sharing all of this with us. One last question before we go is you know, this is this is difficult work, you know, you're you're pounding your head up against the wall, you're trying to bridge different people that maybe don't want to listen, you're you're sometimes having to go into battle yourself, uh, you know, figuratively, metaphorically. What what keeps getting you to show up? What what fuels you? What's the motivation that says, hey, I've been doing this 27 years and I'm I'm Monday, I'm gonna be right back at it?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:48

It's that sense of purpose and mission and meaning, you know. I I I've come to realize that that finding a sense of meaning in this career has been the key for me. I'm a meaning over money guy, probably to a fault. Um but it it's what keeps me going. And and along the way, and I think this is an important uh topic to discuss with with folks that do this work, with veterans and non-veterans, is is secondary trauma, right? And it's very real um for all of us. Um we deal you know with so many people who've been through so much trauma, and and that's certainly the case uh in our practice, and something that I have come to learn you've got to manage. Um there was a time there where Ryan and I I think just felt if we weren't working 120 hours a week, we were failing. Yeah. We're failing our our clients, failing veterans, um, and then we just need to suck it up and keep keep up the mission. And that caught up with us, and we definitely both experienced kind of crash outs towards the tail end of finishing the book project and the height of all of the stuff happening at that time. And and uh I had a really pivotal conversation with a therapist around that time at the VA, um, who who gave me this analogy about secondary trauma. You know, he said uh he said it's like you're you're starting out with an empty rucksack, and every piece of secondary trauma that you pick up from a client is like a little pebble.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:25

And and a few pebbles in the bottom of an empty rucksack doesn't weigh much, you don't notice it. But over the years they keep accumulating and accumulating, and you don't notice it because the weight is gradual and and everything, but but eventually it's gonna bring you down, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:42

And in this analogy, terrible power of the things that you carry.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:46

Yeah, and and the interesting in the and the key to this analogy is that the way to solve it is you tear a little hole in the bottom of that rucksack that allows the pebbles to drain out of the bottom of it, and that that comes from taking care of yourself, get outside, go ride your bike, go enjoy life, you gotta get rest, you gotta take time away from the mission, or you will not be able to continue performing the mission and you will fail your clients in the future, right? And that was a hard lesson to learn, and I think we both had to bottom out before we were prepared to listen to it. But um the last decade of the work, I would say, has been much better in that regard for us in our lives. Uh, it made us actually more productive than that first decade, yeah, you know, um, where we were really in the thick of it and not thinking in the big picture. And I I always say that to fellow defense lawyers is you've got to take care of yourselves before you can take care of your client. And and uh it's okay. You don't need to feel guilty about it, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:36:48

Well, thanks for coming and sharing. I hope I hope you've uh helped all of us to put a hole in our rucksack that's a little a little bigger, a little wider to let let things travel through. So I've greatly enjoyed it. Thanks again.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:00

It's been an honor. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:12

Thanks for listening to Sanctuary in the Jungle. This episode was brought to you with the help of May Daly and Nelson Defense Group. If you enjoyed the listen, share the episode with a friend, whether it's someone working in the system, someone who wants to learn more, or someone who's never thought about criminal defense before. My hope is that these conversations not only encourage you to care more about our legal system and the people in it, but also to share that energy with others, keeping the whole community moving forward. So carry the hope, share that hope with a friend, and we'll see you next time at the library.