The new Veterans Discharge Upgrade Review Clinic at Salmon P. Chase College of Law is giving students plenty of experience with government administrative appeals and plenty of expert advice in doing it: Faculty Adviser John Bickers and Clinic Director Brad Steffen are former attorneys in the military Judge Advocate General Corps.
The clinic students they are guiding in a pro bono partnership with the Cincinnati Veterans Administration Medical Center, the Northern Kentucky Bar Association and Legal Aid of the Bluegrass are giving veterans with slightly blemished military records a pathway to obtaining veterans benefits that their less-than-fully-honorable discharge statuses deny them.
The military discharge system is far more complex – or nuanced – than the black-and-white “honorable” or “dishonorable” of common perception. And because of that, the government established a review process to allow veterans to seek reconsiderations of their statuses. But it can be complex and lengthy. Enter the Chase Veterans Discharge Upgrade Review Clinic, and the administrative labyrinth students enter.
• Starting at the beginning, and what Professor Bickers has explained to students about the “good” and “not so good” types of military discharges.
“The military separates service members administratively for a wide variety of reasons, for things like retirement, personal hardships that cause the service member to request release, and patterns of misconduct. Most of the reasons people separate result in a characterization of service as ‘honorable,’ but some leave the service member with a discharge characterized as ‘general, under honorable conditions,’ which denies some VA benefits, and a few can result in an ‘other-than-honorable’ discharge, which denies almost all benefits.”
• Why he says a less-than-fully-honorable discharge is reviewable for the purpose of VA benefits.
“As with every action by government, sometimes mistakes happen, or people are treated unfairly. And sometimes things change, and people change, and in the interests of justice, they should not be judged by mistakes of long ago. With that understanding, Congress established two separate tribunals that review such discharges, with an eye to fixing mistakes that may have occurred in the past or providing an equitable answer for the future.”
• And his explanation for why reviews are occurring nationwide, with the VA supporting initiation of them.
“Partly it is the result of the fact that we know more now. Many discharges arose from repeated small acts of misconduct that were themselves the result of post-traumatic stress disorder. When service members with prior good records had troubles after returning from combat, the military should have taken that into account in characterizing their service. The military didn’t always do that. In late 2020, the Army entered into a settlement in a case brought by students from Yale Law School that required the Army to reconsider discharge cases and grant ‘liberal consideration’ to the PTSD that may have led to the misconduct. [In 2014, then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had directed the Army, Navy and Air Force to fully consider applications for discharge upgrades based on PTSD stemming from military service.] The VA, which has always been an advocate for those who have served the nation, has been trying to help those affected.”
On that foundation of support for the review process, in which claims of misdiagnosed PTSD or legal errors are more likely than others to succeed, Chase is among a number of law schools at which students are helping veterans build cases and students are building practice skills.
“Students assisting pro-bono attorneys will be able to hone their skills at the most fundamental advocacy role: helping clients tell their story,” says Professor Bickers, who taught law courses at the United States Military Academy at West Point before he joined the Chase faculty in 2006. “Students will be able to consider the facts of the individual veteran’s case, compare it to the governing law and regulations, and assist the veteran in understanding how best to assemble the facts into a case that is most likely to convince the boards to grant relief.”
The clinic, for which students receive credit toward a graduation requirement for pro bono service, is a path to the future, says Director Steffen, who graduated from Chase in 2015 and practices in the Northern Kentucky firm of Dressman Benzinger Lavell. “I will be working with the students and clients to help them understand the upgrade process and to develop a course of action based upon the client’s needs. My goal is that the students will be able to develop crucial hands-on client interaction that they will carry with them after graduating,” he says. For many students, the review process they help initiate will be so lengthy that they will have graduated before the veteran they helped receives a determination.
• Individuals who might benefit from clinic assistance can call the recorded clinic hotline at 859-572-6918 to leave a message.