The unemployment rate for veterans rose slightly in June, to 8 percent overall and 11.5 percent for Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans, a sign that expanding programs aimed at helping veterans find work are not working in a stagnant job market. June employment statistics released Friday by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics show the overall unemployment rate for veterans rose slightly from 7.8 percent in May. Still, the unemployment rate for veterans remains lower than the overall national rate of 9.5 percent.

For military justice practitioners I think it’s useful to think of these numbers as an additional bad sign for those leaving active duty under less than honorable discharge circumstances.

The Air Force Times also reports:

Married to a second lieutenant, the woman couldn’t help herself. She vented. She gave up a good civil service job and her husband was a staff sergeant, steadily climbing the enlisted ranks, when they decided he should go to Officer Training School. He excelled. She pinned on his bars in December. Now, he’s out of a job, one of 28 junior officers getting kicked out because they either haven’t started their initial skills training course or didn’t finish the training. By year’s end, the service will cut 6,000 airmen — enlisted and officer — because so few are leaving on their own due to the recession. The number of officers, second lieutenants to colonels, targeted for discharge is 1,373.

Note the reference to the job market.

Moved by a huge tide of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress, Congress has pressured the Department of Veterans Affairs to settle their disability claims — quickly, humanely and mostly in the vets’ favor. This 1969 photo shows Keith Roberts in Navy uniform. Starting in 1987, Roberts filed a string of disability claims with the Veterans Affairs, eventually blaming PTSD for everything from smoking addiction to arthritis. In 1999, Roberts was declared 100 percent disabled and got a lump sum payment, retroactive to August 1993. He was convicted of wire fraud, sentenced to 48 months in prison and ordered to pay $262,943.52 in restitution. Marine Corps Times The problem: The system is dysfunctional, an open invitation to fraud. And the VA has proposed changes that could make deception even easier. PTSD’s real but invisible scars can mark clerks and cooks just as easily as they can infantrymen fighting a faceless enemy in these wars without front lines. The VA is seeking to ease the burden of proof to ensure that their claims are processed swiftly.

Should military veterans get a break when they are sentenced for crimes?

Asks a piece in the Wall Street Journal. This is interesting in light of some discussion on CAAFLog about sentencing in court-martial and sentence ranges under the UCMJ. Seems some civilian judges are more interested in giving a sentence based on the whole person and individualized rather than a set amount.

“We dump all kinds of money to get soldiers over there and train them to kill, but we don’t do anything to reintegrate them into our society,” says John L. Kane, a federal judge in Denver.

Two weeks ago Kane sentenced a former Iraq war vet, John Brownfield (pictured in Iraq in 2004), to probation rather than prison after he pleaded guilty to illegally selling tobacco to prison inmates when he worked as a correctional officer in 2007. Kane did so despite the fact that Brownfield’s lawyer and the prosecution initially recommended that he sentence Brownfield to a year in prison.

Here’s a WSJ Law Journal piece, which details the proliferation of special criminal courts being set up across the country to keep vets out of prison as well as examples of leniency by federal judges. Click here for Kane’s absorbing 30-page sentencing memo in the Brownfield case.

The phenomenon is stirring up controversy. Some legal experts say singling out veterans risks establishing a two-tier system of justice.