There’s an issue that’s affected untold thousands of veterans in our community, and a group of volunteers in Philadelphia is trying to do something about it. These volunteers aren’t just anyone, either — they are currently practicing attorneys whose services usually call for a hefty $400–800 per hour fee. And they’re putting their advanced legal skills to use to help those veterans — who in the past decade and a half have put some very different skills to use to secure our nation’s freedoms. Justice Isn’t Always Blind All over the nation, there are veterans who have had a tough time adjusting to life back in the US. This is nothing new. Whether it was Ira Hayes who was a renowned alcoholic following his experiences in Bougainville and Iwo Jima to untold numbers of veterans in Vietnam and beyond, the trauma of war can often cause some serious issues in terms of what goes into someone’s life back home. But that isn’t all. Sometimes, people have been arrested for things that they didn’t do, and even after being found innocent are still denied jobs because of an arrest in their past. Unfortunately, there is an opinion born of ignorance that someone who has been arrested did something wrong. In fact, there is nothing less American than that. One of the provisions enshrined in the Constitution is innocence until proven guilty. It is the cornerstone of our legal system. But still, sometimes, businesses make decisions based upon arrest records and not whether or not the individual actually committed a crime. What Citizens Are Doing About It This past Monday, the DiSorbs Systems Plant in Philly was offered by the company as a makeshift “expungement clinic” where veterans with criminal records could come in and get legal help that normally would be far beyond their means. This runs the gamut of everyone from DUI arrests that were never convictions to other arrests that themselves prevented one veteran from getting a job. Mind, these instances were not convictions in court, they were simply arrests. The issue is that in the state of Philadelphia, the law does not allow for automatic expungement of records when someone is acquitted of a crime. This means that innocent people’s mugshots and arrest records are available to the public, even though the courts previously found these veterans innocent. Whereas it’s only legal to use convictions to reject job applicants, that still hasn’t stopped many employers from finding elusive ways to deny some of these veterans jobs as the result of their finds. For those stuck in this mess, it isn’t only infuriating, it’s messing with their livelihoods and their families. The Larger Picture This is a great program that, in conjunction with veterans’ courts, have made a real, lasting difference in veterans’ lives. In the instances of veterans’ courts, a veteran’s service to country can be considered when sentencing and someone, say, with PTSD and a drug addiction can get counseling and a monitored parole instead of facing years in prison. Without a doubt, the law needs to be enforced. But all too often, veterans aren’t exactly given the resources that are necessary for a positive transition into civilian life. In the height of the war, the military increased its waivers to allow for more people to serve in a time of need. Sometimes, these people already had troublesome pasts, which the military was hopefully going to help to fix. The problem often came when those veterans would return home without a proper support network. Often, they would get involved back in the same problems that landed them in legal hot water to begin with. Now, in seeing this — not to mention the success rate of rehabilitating veterans instead of trying to simply punish them — has made a positive impact on communities throughout the nation. It’s helped a great deal to level out those scales and help to ensure that justice can again be blind for all Americans.
