Lawsuit alleges Navy review board is biased against veterans with PTSD
During a deployment to Iraq in 2003, Marine Corps Cpl. Tyson Manker was responsible for cleaning up the remains of his friend who accidentally discharged his firearm, shooting himself in the head.
Earlier in the deployment, during which he saw intense combat and suffered multiple concussive blasts, Manker accidentally shot a teenage girl, whom he mistook for an armed insurgent.
At home after the deployment, he smoked marijuana with two junior Marines to soothe his symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He was caught and administratively separated from the military with an other-than-honorable discharge.
Manker, of Jacksonville, Ill., filed a class-action lawsuit Friday in federal court in Connecticut seeking relief for thousands of Navy and Marine Corps veterans who, like him, developed PTSD and other mental health conditions during their military service and received so-called bad-paper discharges.
"The American public needs to know that hundreds of thousands of military veterans with service-connected PTSD and TBI are being denied support and VA resources because of an unfair discharge status," Manker said in a news release announcing the suit.
Students with Yale Law School's Veterans Legal Services Clinic, which has filed a similar lawsuit against the Army, are representing the vets, who say that the Naval Discharge Review Board, which reviews discharge appeals from Navy and Marine Corps vets, is biased toward applicants involving PTSD.
That's despite a 2014 directive from then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel advising discharge review boards to give liberal consideration to PTSD-based applications. The suit alleges that the naval review board denies almost 85 percent of those applications.
"The Navy is defying the Department of Defense, Congress, and the Constitution in a way that the other boards are not," law student intern Samantha Peltz said in the news release.
In 2017, according to Peltz, the Army and Air Force discharge review boards granted discharge upgrades in about 51 percent of cases involving PTSD. That same year, the Navy board granted 16 percent.
"The disparity is staggering," she said.
Critics of the effort to upgrade the discharge statuses for these veterans have said it's hard to discern whether a person was a bad soldier or was acting out because of PTSD or other mental health issues.
At the end of his deployment, Manker completed a post-deployment health assessment, indicating he'd been exposed to a host of traumatic events such as seeing fellow service members as well as civilians wounded and killed. He was not referred for treatment or any further evaluation, the suit says.
After he was out of the military, two separate civilian health care providers — a private doctor and a therapist — diagnosed Manker with PTSD. He provided documentation of this when he applied in June 2016 to upgrade his discharge status to honorable. The board denied his application, saying, according to the lawsuit, "that his PTSD did not mitigate his misconduct and, rather, that he made 'willful,' 'conscious decisions to violate the ten[e]ts of honorable and faithful service.'"
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