Gordon Erspamer: legal advocate for military veterans, dies

Gordon Erspamer, a radiation victim’s son who became one of the nation’s foremost courtroom advocates for military veterans, died of brain cancer Nov. 7 at his home in Moraga. He was 61.

by Arnaldo Rodgers

Mr. Erspamer argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1985 on behalf of the National Association of Radiation Survivors, challenging a Civil War-era law that barred veterans from paying lawyers more than $10 to seek service-connected benefits. He lost in court but won in Congress, which repealed the fee limit and later established a new court to hear veterans’ cases. Another suit he argued over veterans’ mental health care was also dismissed but helped to spur the Department of Veterans Affairs to establish new suicide-prevention programs.

Two years ago, shortly before he retired from law practice, Mr. Erspamer won a ruling from a federal judge in Oakland allowing a class-action suit by about 100,000 veterans seeking information and medical care for their exposure to chemicals during decades of secret weapons experiments by the armed services and the CIA. That case is still pending.

“He made himself available to the veterans he represented and would take any call from anybody at any time,” said Michael Blecker, executive director of Swords to Plowshares in San Francisco, which provides services to veterans. “These guys had issues, they were angry … and here was someone powerful who could validate and signify their experiences as a soldier.”

“There wasn’t any lawyer in America that was pursing this cause with as much vigor as Gordy Erspamer,” said Arturo Gonzalez, who is a partner at Morrison & Foerster, the San Francisco law firm where Mr. Erspamer worked for 30 years.

His father, Ernest Erspamer, was a survey officer on a military vessel in the South Pacific in 1946 and was exposed to radiation from a U.S underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The VA denied his claim for radiation sickness and, after his death from leukemia in 1980, denied his wife’s claim for benefits. Mr. Erspamer, who had just become a lawyer, took up his mother’s case and, 10 years later, won it with the help of a ruling by the veterans court Congress had just established.

His 2007 lawsuit on behalf of two veterans groups presented strong evidence of systemic delays and neglect in the mental health care system: VA documents showing that the system took an average of 4.4 years to review veterans’ appeals, that more than 1,400 veterans who were denied coverage had died in one six-month period while their appeals were pending, and that 18 veterans per day nationwide were committing suicide, much higher than the rate among the general population.

After a trial in 2008, a federal judge in San Francisco agreed that the VA’s delays were harming veterans but said the courts had no power to intervene. The ruling incensed Mr. Erspamer, who told The Chronicle, “There’s got to be a remedy somewhere for the poor slobs who are fighting for our country.”

A federal appeals court upheld the judge’s decision in May 2012. In the meantime, however, the federal agency had started to take steps it had previously announced but never implemented, such as hiring regional suicide-prevention coordinators and establishing a nationwide suicide-prevention hotline. The lawsuit “shamed Congress and the VA into acting,” said Gonzalez, who argued the case along with Mr. Erspamer.

Gordon Paul Erspamer was born in Ironwood, Mich., in 1953 and attended law school at the University of Michigan, where he met his future wife, Trish Bare. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1978, and Mr. Erspamer joined Morrison & Foerster four years later and became a partner in the firm, focusing on intellectual property and energy law. With the firm’s support, he also handled cases for veterans and their advocates without charge.

Despite being bedridden and disabled from cancer in his final months, his wife said, he was able to use a wheelchair to attend a celebration of his life with family and friends in July.

He is survived by his wife; sons Kevin Erspamer of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Brian Erspamer of Moraga; and daughters Kerry Ginsberg of Walnut Creek and Brett Erspamer of Boston. No services are planned.