Justice Eileen Moore on Serving Her Country and Making a Difference

The following is an excerpt from “They Were Soldiers: The Sacrifices and Contributions of Our Vietnam Veterans,” by Joseph L. Galloway and Marvin J. Wolf. It tells the story of Eileen Moore, an Army nurse who served in Vietnam. During her service, she endured attacks and assaults but returned home to live a life of passion and purpose.

After Vietnam, Moore was assigned to Germany, where she completed her service.

When she returned to civilian status, she worked as a nurse in Chicago and then in Los Angeles, and she began to read, including Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.1 She explained, “It started working in my head. I wondered if it was possible that somebody like me, a nobody, the daughter of high school dropouts, could study at a university.”

She enrolled first at a community college and then at the University of California, Irvine. There she came into contact with large numbers of Vietnam veterans and saw they were social lepers, loathed because of their service in an unpopular war. Many students took part in demonstrations against the war that still raged in Vietnam.

Moore graduated cum laude in 1975 and then started law school at Pepperdine University. Three years later, after passing the state bar exam, she entered private practice as a civil litigator. In 1989, Republican governor George Deukmejian appointed her to the Superior Court of California, County of Orange, as a trial judge, and eleven years later, Democrat governor Gray Davis appointed her to the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division Three.

In 1997, while still a trial judge, Moore was asked to speak at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum by the Vietnam Veterans of America, Chapter 785. Also on the program was Medal of Honor recipient Col. William Barber.

“I told them about my first night in-country, about how two officers tried to break into the transient nurses quarters,” Moore recalled. Colonel Barber seemed bothered by her choice of subject, but in the audience were three rows of men in tattered jungle fatigues. “It took me a few seconds to analyze and diagnose they were all self-medicated, homeless Vietnam veterans.”

After her presentation, these men surrounded Moore. With evident respect, they gently touched her skin. Many had tears in their eyes. This made her realize “there was something important about nurses.” Moore described, “Perhaps these men had no positive memories of Vietnam, except for the nurses who took care of them. I wondered if maybe they were still looking for us nurses to help them.”

Until then, Moore had not involved herself with veterans’ activities. But from that night forward, she became steadily more involved. She became a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America and took it upon herself to mentor veterans, among them women who had been sexually assaulted.

Justice Moore continues to take care of those whose war has not ended, the veterans whose hearts and minds have yet to heal.

In 2009, California was one of a few states with veterans’ courts and the only one with a court exclusively for combat veterans. Veterans’ courts begin by accepting guilty pleas for whatever a veteran is charged with. Under supervision, each veteran is followed through three phases of a recovery plan until the veteran demonstrates a capacity to succeed in society. Then his or her sentence is suspended.

As a mentor, Judge Moore attended a session of Orange County’s combat veterans’ court. “That day the judge called a case involving a Vietnam veteran,” she recalled. “This was unusual because most of the vets in that court had served in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

The Vietnam vet had been homeless and under the influence of some mind-altering substance for most of his adult life, but he was now sober and sublimely happy. He showed the judge a college paper with an A+ mark on it. He was thrilled at his own success and effusively thanked the judge.

Then a rattling sound issued from the side of the courtroom where in-custody defendants awaited their cases to be called. A man called out who “looked as if he’d lived in a gutter for forty years,” Moore recalled. “What skin was visible was like broken concrete. He was absolutely filthy.”

Yet the anticipation on his face was a beacon of hope after he saw a fellow Vietnam vet succeed. He wanted his chance. “He begged the judge to let him into veterans’ court,” Moore recalled. He had been rejected because the limited funding for this court meant only those most likely to succeed were allowed in. This inmate’s years of being in and out of jail did not bode well for his chances of success.

But he continued to beg for another chance.

The judge relented. “There was consternation among members of a team of lawyers, probation officers, Veterans Affairs representatives, and mental health professionals who wanted someone with more promise to fill that spot,” Moore recalled.

When the court recessed, Moore went to a holding cell and introduced herself to the veteran. “I told him I was a judge, but I had served as a nurse in Vietnam,” she said. “He could not have cared less that I was a judge. He grabbed my hand and clutched it. He looked straight into my eyes and said, ‘I would never let a nurse down. You were angels to us over there.”

“About eighteen months later, he came back to court looking like a college professor. Clean, sober, and scrubbed, he graduated from veterans’ court. He was asked to say a few words, and he turned to look at me. ‘I told you that I would never let a nurse down,’ he said.”

That experience impacted her greatly.

California has the world’s largest court system, with approximately ten million court filings a year and almost six hundred courthouses. “There is a governing body called the Judicial Council,” Moore explained. In 2008, she contacted the council’s administrator. “I said, ‘I’m afraid that the same thing that happened to Vietnam vets will happen to the returning vets from Afghanistan and Iraq, and I’d like the courts to be ready for them so that these veterans are not out in the cold again.’ ”

Thus was born the Veterans Working Group for California Courts. Moore has chaired it since the beginning. California now has thirty veterans’ treatment courts. The first was in Orange County, where Moore lives and works. “I didn’t start the court,” she explained. “I gathered veterans to work as mentors to defendants in that court.”

This working group tries to make it easier for veterans who are charged with lawbreaking to know that help is available and how to find it. An early task was the creation of a website for the California courts that spells out veterans’ rights and provides forms to help them get into a veterans’ court. It also lists the statutes that govern veterans. Of particular usefulness is a form that Moore’s group devised that courts are now required to provide each veteran.

The first step in anyone’s journey through the criminal courts is an arraignment, where a prosecutor describes the evidence against a defendant and the defendant is told of the charge(s) and must then plead guilty or not guilty. If a veteran enters a guilty plea, he or she is given the form that Moore’s group devised. “At the bottom of the first page is a notation that a veteran service officer will be contacted by the court, and the veteran can get assistance through that officer without cost to the veteran,” Moore explained.

The creation and manner of distribution of this form were critical to the success of the veterans’ court because criminal defense lawyers were no longer involved in telling clients about the veterans’ court. Not to impugn the motives of any criminal defense lawyer, but fees may be based on how much time and effort are expended in defense of a client. Those diverted to veterans’ court have pleaded guilty to their offenses and their futures are in their own hands, guided by mentors and supervised by the court.

Although many states now have veterans’ courts, Moore’s work isn’t finished.

“Most people, including many judges, are under the delusion that the statutes under which veterans’ courts operate are only applicable in those courts,” she explained. “But they may be used in any criminal court where a veteran is a defendant.” Moore suspects that some judges are not aware of this and that many of those involved in the court system are reluctant to use them. “We have tried and continue to try to educate as much as we can,” she said. “Sometimes you have to take baby steps,” she added, in changing long-established attitudes.

Moore has widened her focus to family courts. “When somebody acts out violently, it’s usually within the family,” she explained. “I’m very concerned that veterans who have been subject to incredible explosions that toss their brains around inside their skulls—sometimes they act out violently and end up losing their children. They encounter all sorts of negative ramifications employment-wise.

The courts have to be prepared to triage, to use a nursing term, to sort violent power and control freaks from veterans injured in combat who act out violently as a result. We didn’t really know about brain damage until the Iraq War. But now that we do, the courts should respond.”

Justice Moore’s curriculum vitae lists thirty pages of awards and more pages of civic organizations to which she devotes time and effort. To answer the question Moore posed to herself so many years ago, yes, in America it’s possible for a nobody to finish university and then law school and become an appellate justice if that nobody has the work ethic, guts, and brains of Eileen Moore.

Excerpted from They Were Soldiers by Joseph L. Galloway and Marvin J. Wolf. Copyright © 2020 by Joseph L. Galloway and Marvin J. Wolf. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson. www.TheyWereSoldiersBook.com.

This excerpt was featured in the May 24th edition of The Sunday Paper. The Sunday Paper inspires hearts and minds to rise above the noise. To get The Sunday Paper delivered to your inbox each Sunday morning for free, click here to subscribe.