A stint in the Army as a teenager turned out to be a life-changing experience for Minnesota Law alum Brock Hunter ’97.
Hunter, who has run his own criminal defense practice in Minneapolis for the past 26 years, specializes in defending veterans. He is also a nationally recognized advocate for rehabilitation and crime prevention for members of the military who return home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Hunter was only 17 and still finishing high school when he signed on the dotted line to join the Army.
“I was enlisted straight out of high school, and I served as a cavalry scout,” Hunter recalled. “I was stationed on the demilitarized zone in Korea in the summer of 1989, when the North Koreans amassed 1.5 million troops on the border and seemed poised to invade. Thankfully, the invasion never came, and the war never happened, and my buddies and I all came home. But even that was a searing experience for me and the people I served with.”
Returning home, Hunter found it difficult to readjust to civilian life. His entrance into college after being stationed at a hostile border ready to fight and die at any moment was a “culture shock,” he said.
He found his way, however, and ended up at Minnesota Law. Soon after he graduated, he started his own firm, serving as a part-time public defender, and immediately noticed how many of his clients had served in the Vietnam War. Back then, Hunter didn’t know much about PTSD, but his limited experience in the military allowed him to empathize with veterans who experienced far worse combat.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Hunter met up with a former classmate, criminal defense lawyer, and former CIA officer, Jack Rice ’97. The two predicted that it wouldn’t be long before they’d start seeing veterans returning from the new wars in Afghanistan and Iraq falling into the criminal justice system, too. Unfortunately, they were right. Now, 25 years later, Hunter has represented well over 1,000 veteran clients.
“In the early years of these conflicts, I was defending an escalating number of veterans and doing research and trying to figure out what was going on and how we could do a better job,” Hunter said. “I got more and more frustrated with the lack of understanding within the system of what was driving veterans into trouble and how we could do a better job with them. That’s what started to give rise to my motivation to do advocacy outside the courtroom.”
In 2007, while serving as the legislative chair for the Minnesota Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Hunter helped draft and pass a bill that encouraged judges to consider treatment options for veterans who’d been traumatized in combat in lieu of jail or prison time. The bill passed, becoming the second one of its kind in the country, following California.
The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court cited the Minnesota statute in a landmark case, Porter v. McCollum, in which it overturned the death sentence for a veteran convicted of murder. After that, Hunter and his colleagues started getting calls from all over the country about how other states could draft similar legislation.
Since then, Hunter co-founded a policy advocacy nonprofit organization called the Veterans Defense Project and co-authored and edited a legal treatise, The Attorney's Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court. He has been invited to brief members of the Obama and Trump administrations, as well as the leadership of the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has also educated thousands of judges, attorneys, corrections officers, and law enforcement personnel nationwide.
Recently, Hunter and his colleagues helped pass the updated 2021 Veterans Restorative Justice Act (VRJA) in Minnesota, which allows veterans who committed low and mid-level offenses to avoid criminal conviction if they commit to mental health or substance abuse treatment. The key to the VRJA is that it creates a real incentive for veterans to commit to and finish treatment.
“One of the challenges with veterans in the justice system is they’re coming from this warrior culture in which PTSD has always had a big stigma, and they’re very reluctant to raise their hand and ask for help,” Hunter said. “If they’re coming into the VA for treatment as part of a criminal sentence where completion of the VA programming is a condition of their probation, now you’ve got the leverage to get them in these programs.”
After the bill’s passage, Hunter and Ryan Else, co-founder of the Veterans Defense Project, were recruited to serve as senior advisors on the Veterans Justice Commission, a project of the Council on Crime and Justice chaired by former Senator and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. They were tasked with creating a model policy that states could adopt to get therapeutic treatment for veterans who end up in the justice system. The resulting Veterans Justice Act was passed in Nebraska last year, and similar bills are being considered in a handful of other states.
Anders Folk ’01 is the chair of the board at the Veterans Defense Project and a longtime friend of Hunter. The pair met during a trip to the Boundary Waters when Folk was a student at Minnesota Law and about to join the Marines, and Hunter was a recent graduate. Folk, a former federal prosecutor, kept in touch with Hunter and compared notes.
Folk has always found Hunter’s work impressive, but especially the advocacy work that goes beyond individual clients and cases. He shares Hunter’s view that veterans deserve a second chance.
“Anybody who signs up to serve in the armed forces, we owe them a kind of debt,” Folk said. “When their service results in psychological trauma that leads veterans to get in trouble with the law, it’s only right that we do what we can to acknowledge that their service may, in some way, have played a role in why they’re in the criminal justice system, and we get them back to being productive members of society.”