VA, Veterans Face Off Over Lawyers’ Pay

A military expert testified Tuesday that Veterans Administration regulations covering radiation claims are the most complex on the agency’s books.

Military law expert Keith Snyder made the statement at the start of a historic U.S. District Court trial on the class-action suit filed in 1983 by the National Assn. of Radiation Survivors.

The suit is an attack on a 125-year-old law that placed a ceiling of $10 on the amount veterans can pay lawyers to represent them before the VA.

Lack of Due Process Charged

The group launched the lawsuit to overturn the law, arguing that it denies veterans with complex legal claims their constitutional rights to due process and the right to redress their grievances with the government.

Snyder described the myriad of regulations governing handling of disability and death claims by veterans exposed to radiation as the most difficult in the VA.

“The body of regulations is a very, very complex set of material. It is difficult to characterize just how difficult they are. . . . I can see nothing more difficult in VA claims,” Snyder said.

The radiation survivors’ group must convince U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel that the claim process is so complex that a high probability of error exists in the VA’s own handling of the benefits procedures and that access to attorneys would sharply cut the high error rate.

The suit involves veterans who have health injury claims as a result of exposure to radiation during World War II or in later atomic tests in the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site.

Over the objection of VA lawyers, Snyder testified that some of the very documents that veterans would need to prepare their appeals for disability to the VA are not available in any organized, indexed form.

Snyder said, however, that indexes of the information are available to the VA regional officials who sit in judgment in the early stages of the claim process.

Only Agency With No Outside Review

The VA, the third-largest agency in the federal government, is the only agency that has no outside court review of its decisions.

Of the 7,781 radiation claims filed with the VA, only 17 veterans have been awarded 100% disability payments. All but one of those vets died before the award was made, association director Dorothy Legarreta said.

The trial, preceded by four years of legal wrangling, is expected to last a month. It is a non-jury trial.

More than 2 million documents have been filed in the case.

Outside the courtroom were 48 boxes packed with red and black binders of evidence to be presented by the radiation survivors’ group.

Among the approximately 50 spectators who filled the court was former Marine Master Sgt. Reason (Fred) Warehime, 61, who is the sole survivor of the three former servicemen who originally filed the suit.

Warehime was exposed to radiation in the cleanup of Nagasaki after the atomic bomb blast at the end of World War II and again in a 1953 atomic test at Camp Desert Rock, Nev., when he was 3,000 yards from ground zero.

He wants his current 60% disability rating, amounting to payments of $671 per month, increased to 100% as a result of the radiation exposure.

The VA has refused. No lawyer will take Warehime’s case and the other veterans like him because he cannot pay them more than $10.