In early November 2015, we stood in a Mankato, Minnesota, courtroom and held our breaths as a jury announced the fate of our client, a man we had come to love. Levi Minissale is a former Marine who never should have served in the military due to severe mental illness, but who did serve in some of the worst fighting of the Afghan war. Now, he faced a sentence of life without parole, because he had done at home what the Marines taught him to do in war: killed his ex-girlfriend and attempted to kill her husband. We had argued at trial that, in a perfect storm of mental illness, military conditioning, and violent combat experiences, Levi was following the orders of a voice in his head that he perceived to be God to kill these people and was therefore not criminally responsible for his actions.
“Not guilty by reason of mental illness” was read for all four counts, starting with first-degree murder. This was the first such jury verdict in a Minnesota murder case in more than thirty years and only the second such verdict in the country for a veteran of our current wars. With tears of relief, we grabbed Levi to hug him, then stood by as he shared hugs with his emotional family members. We then saw him off to his civil commitment at the state mental hospital, where he would receive treatment for his illness and, one day, have a chance to return home to his family. Seeing Levi’s mother hug him for the first time in two-and-a-half years was one of the most rewarding moments of our lives.
Levi’s case was an ideal opportunity to apply many of the special strategies and cultural competencies we have worked so hard over the past decade to develop and spread throughout the nation’s criminal defense bar. We had the honor of working with two amazing psychological experts, Drs. Jennifer Service and Ernest Boswell, in discovering and ultimately telling the story of the very foreign landscape of Levi’s ill mind. We were inspired by the courage of Levi’s former squad leader to boldly tell the jury of how Levi struggled in the Marine Corps and about his rapid mental deterioration under the strain of intense combat. We were grateful to the former Marine officer, who had served in the same area of Afghanistan, as he educated the jury on the nature of modern counter insurgency warfare and its confusing, morally ambiguous nature. We formed a bond with the Minissale family and were amazed by their bravery in the face of such incredible scrutiny, uncertainty, and turmoil. Despite the long time it took to prepare and the risks we faced, they never lost faith in our ability to tell Levi’s story. Finally, we were awe struck by a jury that looked at both the horror of Levi’s offense and his experiences, taking on the incredible weight of their decision and finding in their hearts the ability to stand for justice, which in this case required forgiveness.
Levi’s trial was also rewarding because we have made—and, we hope, kept—a commitment to helping veterans like Levi who would likely not be in criminal trouble but for their military service. We have worked to establish best practices for the defense of veterans whose service-related disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or traumatic brain injury (TBI), significantly contributed to their criminal behavior. We wrote The Attorney’s Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court (hereinafter Defending Veterans), a treatise on the art and science of such defenses. We also founded the Veterans Defense Project (VDP), a nonprofit corporation seeking to educate attorneys nationally on these issues to help ensure that they, and the American justice system as a whole, do a better job in dealing with this generation of veterans than we did with past generations. This article is an excerpt from that text, and we hope it continues to aid attorneys, families, and other advocates in fighting on behalf of our warriors when their lives are on the line. We all know they would readily have done the same for us in their service.