If the criminal offense was arguably caused by the service, I am with you 100%. I represented a guy who got hooked on heroin in Vietnam, a great record over there, not so good here. He got a break and deserved it. Another lady who was in the Air Force, but in peacetime, accounting, etc. Couldn’t make much of that, beyond her general lack of a criminal record, and record of steady employment.

Jack

I think Jack raises a good point. I would go one step further to say that if the reason we want to treat “veterans” with leniency is because of their voluntary decision, then we need to identify whether an individual veteran made such an equally-laudable decision. There are a significant number of “veterans” whose military service resulted from great financial need, from aggressive high-school recruiting, or from a draft. Friends of mine have enrolled as a way to pay for medical school with a short service period after it, as a chaplain, to pay for law school, as well as for a feeling of civic duty.

While the majority, if not the vast majority, of military service members may be deserving of such leniency, it is due to either their reason for singing up or their service while on duty, but not because they are a “veteran.”

Also, ParatrooperJJ, the “blank check” is not a lifetime commitment. Do we treat members who extend their enrollments or re-enroll differently than those who only serve a few years and then decide they’ve had enough? Is someone who never left the U.S. as deserving of leniency as someone serving in an active combat zone? I understand that the contract to serve is not as easily broken as at-will employment as a firefighter, but fighting one fire is more dangerous than certain (although perhaps the vast minority) military roles. We need to know exactly what it is that makes a person deserving of leniency rather than such a broad title.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=392880

There I argue it is both illiberal and inconsistent with retributive justice to give sentencing discounts based on, among other things, veteran status alone (as opposed to say mental illness contracted through veteran status).

Veteran status is much more ambiguous than a criminal conviction, and taking it into account opens up a can of worms. This is not to say it should not be part of the picture in extreme cases.

There’s no question that military troops serving in obvious parts of the world are placing their lives at risk everyday. But what is the connection between that service and a justice system’s leniency that makes them more deserving of lenient treatment than a teacher, firefighter, or civil servant who commits the same crime? I suppose I like to think that we treat every person who commits a certain crime the same regardless of who they are——ignoring military status, occupation, race, gender, wealth, etc.

If mental health status is what makes them deserving of leniency, then we should treat everyone with such an illness the same way. Otherwise, we risk granting leniency to some military members with very low-risk jobs (staffing the Pentagon) or who never even saw combat, while denying it to others who have put much more on the line for the public good (firemen).