Vincent Curtis Conyers v. Douglas A. Collins, Secretary of Veterans Affairs

N OTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.
United States Court of Appeals
for the Federal Circuit
______________________
VINCENT CURTIS CONYERS,
Claimant-Appellant
v.
DOUGLAS A. COLLINS, SECRETARY OF
VETERANS AFFAIRS,
Respondent-Appellee
______________________
2025-2010
______________________
Appeal from the United States Court of Appeals for
Veterans Claims in No. 17-4423, Judge Joseph L. Toth.
______________________
Decided: July 20, 2026
______________________
VINCENT CURTIS CONYERS , Uniondale, NY, pro se.
ELINOR J OUNG K IM , Commercial Litigation Branch,
Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, Wash-
ington, DC, for respondent-appellee. Also represented by
ERIC P. BRUSKIN, P ATRICIA M. MCCARTHY , BRETT SHUMATE.
______________________
Before REYNA, HUGHES , and STOLL , Circuit Judges.
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CONYERS v. COLLINS 2
P ER CURIAM .
Vincent Conyers, proceeding pro se, appeals from the
final decision of the United States Court of Appeals for Vet-
erans Claims denying his Veteran Readiness and Employ-
ment program benefits for self-employment. For the
following reasons, we affirm.
BACKGROUND
I
As this case is before us for a second time, this portion
of the background has been taken from our prior decision
in Conyers v. McDonough (Conyers I), 91 F.4th 1167
(Fed. Cir. 2024).
The United States Department of Veterans Affairs ad-
ministers the Veteran Readiness and Employment (VR&E)
program. The VR&E program is designed to provide bene-
fits and services “to help veterans integrate themselves
into the civilian work force.” Conyers I, 91 F.4th at 1168
(citation omitted). In 2013, Mr. Conyers applied for VR&E
program benefits. After Mr. Conyers submitted various
questionnaires and met with a VA counselor, the VA re-
jected his claim “because his chosen vocational goal was not
feasible.” Id. at 1168–69 (citation omitted). Mr. Conyers
requested administrative review of the VA’s decision to re-
ject his VR&E program claim. The VA promptly issued a
decision finding that Mr. Conyers had not identified a rea-
sonably feasible vocational goal. Mr. Conyers appealed to
the Board of Veterans’ Appeals. The Board affirmed the
VA’s decision that Mr. Conyers’s plan for self-employment
was “not suitable for his circumstances” and thus denied
his claim. Id. at 1169 (citation omitted). Mr. Conyers ap-
pealed the Board’s decision to the Veterans Court.
During the appeal before the Veterans Court, Mr. Co-
nyers made multiple requests, including through motions
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CONYERS v. COLLINS 3
to compel, that certain documents be added to the admin-
istrative record.1 In response, the VA served Mr. Conyers
amended versions of the record and arranged for him to re-
view his file. The VA refused to add other documents to
the record on grounds that the documents had not been be-
fore the Board or constructively possessed by the Board.
On April 9, 2020, the Veterans Court denied a motion
to compel the VA to add the additional documents to the
record, finding Mr. Conyers’s arguments that the docu-
ments were constructively possessed by the Board to be
without merit. In support, the Veterans Court cited its de-
cision in Euzebio v. Wilkie (Euzebio I), 31 Vet. App. 394
(2019). In Euzebio I, the Veterans Court held that for a
document to be deemed constructively possessed by the
Board, the appellant must establish a “direct relationship”
between a document and the appellant’s claim (before the
Board). Conyers I, 91 F.4th at 1169 (citing Euzebio I,
31 Vet. App. at 401–02). Citing Euzebio I and referring to
its “direct relationship” test, the Veterans Court concluded
that Mr. Conyers had “not shown how the documents are
relevant to the issue on appeal or that he is prejudiced.” Id.
(citation omitted). Mr. Conyers filed a motion for reconsid-
eration, which the Veterans Court denied.
Subsequent to the April 2020 Order, this court decided
Euzebio v. McDonough (Euzebio II), 989 F.3d 1305
(Fed. Cir. 2021), which was the appeal from Euzebio I. In
Euzebio II, we concluded that the “direct relationship”
standard adopted by the Veterans Court in Euzebio I was
erroneous. Conyers I, 91 F.4th at 1169 (citing Euzebio II,
989 F.3d at 1321). We held that the correct standard for
constructive possession is “relevance and reasonableness.”
1 The “administrative record” is also sometimes re-
ferred to as the “record before the agency” (RBA). See
Appx 8. “Appx” refers to the Appendix filed by Appellant.
ECF No. 11.
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CONYERS v. COLLINS 4
Id. (citing Euzebio II, 989 F.3d at 1321). Citing Euzebio II,
Mr. Conyers moved the Veterans Court for reconsideration
of the April 2020 Order.
In March 2021, the Veterans Court issued an order
that denied the motion for reconsideration and noted that
“any argument that Mr. Conyers has concerning what ma-
terials may be considered constructively before the Board
can be dealt with during the [Veterans] Court’s review of
the merits of his appeal.” Id. (alteration in original) (cita-
tion omitted).
In August 2022, the Veterans Court issued a single-
judge decision affirming the Board’s rejection of Mr. Co-
nyers’s appeal. As to the issue of constructive possession,
the decision stated the completeness of the record had al-
ready been adjudicated by the Veterans Court’s April 2020
order wherein the Veterans Court determined that the VA
satisfied its obligation to provide a complete record.
In September 2022, Mr. Conyers moved for a panel de-
cision, arguing that the Veterans Court had overlooked this
court’s decision in Euzebio II. His request for a panel deci-
sion was granted, but the panel affirmed the single-judge
decision without addressing or mentioning Euzebio II. The
panel concluded that Mr. Conyers had failed to demon-
strate that the single-judge order overlooked or misunder-
stood a fact or point of law prejudicial to the outcome of the
petition or that there was any conflict with precedential de-
cisions of the court. Mr. Conyers appealed to this court,
and that appeal resulted in our Conyers I decision.
II
In Conyers I, we held that the Veterans Court “applied
an erroneous legal standard for constructive possession” to
Mr. Conyers’s case. 91 F.4th at 1172. We noted that, alt-
hough Mr. Conyers raised the Euzebio II decision before
the Veterans Court after it issued, the court did not address
or mention Euzebio II in any of its subsequent decisions.
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CONYERS v. COLLINS 5
Conyers I, 91 F.4th at 1170. Thus, we vacated the Veter-
ans Court’s decision and remanded the matter for the court
to apply the correct Euzebio II “relevance and reasonable-
ness” legal standard of constructive possession “in its re-
view of Mr. Conyers’[s] claim that certain documents be
made part of the administrative record and considered in
the review of his appeal of the denial of his application for
[VR&E] program benefits.” Conyers I, 91 F.4th at 1172.
On remand, a panel of the Veterans Court applied the
Euzebio II standard to the 169 documents Mr. Conyers re-
quested be added to the administrative record, and it de-
termined that the Secretary was not required by
constructive possession to amend the administrative rec-
ord to include any additional documents. The panel there-
fore denied Mr. Conyers’s motion disputing the contents of
the administrative record and returned the case to the as-
signed judge. On reconsideration, in a single-judge deci-
sion, the Veterans Court ultimately affirmed the Board’s
decision denying Mr. Conyers’s claim for VR&E benefits.
Mr. Conyers then filed the instant appeal.
D ISCUSSION
On appeal, Mr. Conyers makes the following argu-
ments: (1) the Veterans Court used the wrong legal stand-
ard in its constructive possession analysis, see Appellant’s
Br. 35; (2) the Veterans Court improperly applied the legal
standard for constructive possession, see Appellant’s
Br. 20–25; (3) the Veterans Court improperly acted as a
factfinder, Appellant’s Br. 11; and (4) the Veterans Court
violated Mr. Conyers’s due process rights, Appellant’s
Br. 32–38. Our limited jurisdiction to review decisions of
the Veterans Court allows us to review and decide “all rel-
evant questions of law, including interpreting constitu-
tional and statutory provisions.” 38 U.S.C. § 7292(d)(1);
Wanless v. Shinseki, 618 F.3d 1333, 1336 (Fed. Cir. 2010).
“Absent a constitutional issue, however, we lack the juris-
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CONYERS v. COLLINS 6
diction to ‘review (A) a challenge to a factual determina-
tion, or (B) a challenge to a law or regulation as applied to
the facts of a particular case.’” Wanless, 618 F.3d at 1336
(quoting 38 U.S.C. § 7292(d)(2)).
We begin with Mr. Conyers’s argument that the Veter-
ans Court applied the wrong legal standard to its construc-
tive possession analysis, namely, that the Veterans Court
applied a heightened legal standard in its analysis. See
Appellant’s Br. 35 (“By excluding the documents Appellant
identified . . . , the [Veterans Court] applied legal stand-
ards to Appellant’s claim and appeal that [are] considera-
bly higher than standards applied to . . . other similarly
situated individuals.”) “[W]e have authority to decide
whether the Veterans Court applied the correct legal
standard.” Euzebio II, 989 F.3d at 1317 (alteration in orig-
inal) (quoting Sneed v. Shinseki, 737 F.3d 719, 724
(Fed. Cir. 2013)).
We see no legal error with the standard applied by the
Veterans Court. “The correct standard for constructive
possession . . . is relevance and reasonableness.” Id.
at 1321 (citation omitted). “Relevance requires that the
document tend to prove or disprove a material fact.” Id.
at 1324 (citation omitted). The Veterans Court summa-
rized that the “VA constructively possesses a document
when (1) the Secretary has actual or constructive
knowledge of the document, (2) the document tends to
prove or disprove a material fact, and (3) the document pre-
dates the Board decision.” Appx 10. We see no legal error
(nor has Mr. Conyers pointed us to a legal error) in the Vet-
erans Court’s articulation of the standard for constructive
possession as set forth in Euzebio II. We therefore affirm
the Veterans Court as to this portion of Mr. Conyers’s ap-
peal.
We next turn to Mr. Conyers’s various arguments that
the Veterans Court improperly applied the constructive
possession standard to its review. See Appellant’s Br. 25.
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CONYERS v. COLLINS 7
More particularly, Mr. Conyers argues that the Veterans
Court’s application of the constructive possession doctrine
amounted to a “heightened ‘evaluation of evidence’ stand-
ard that inappropriately require[d] for such documents to
compel the specific result of substantiating” his VR&E
claim. Id. As this argument pertains to the Veterans
Court’s application of law to the facts of Mr. Conyers’s case,
we lack jurisdiction to consider this portion of Mr. Co-
nyers’s appeal. 38 U.S.C. § 7292(d)(2).
We next turn to Mr. Conyers’s argument that the Vet-
erans Court exceeded its jurisdiction by “erroneously en-
gag[ing] in fact-finding and weighing of the evidence of
record in the first instance,” Appellant’s Br. 11 (capitaliza-
tion normalized), and we review this question de novo.
Stinson v. McDonough, 92 F.4th 1355, 1360 (Fed. Cir.
2024) (“Whether the Veterans Court exceeded its jurisdic-
tion is a question of law that this court reviews de novo.”).
Mr. Conyers contends that the Veterans Court erred in
performing the constructive possession analysis on the doc-
uments at issue because it “cannot, in the first instance,
find facts nor weigh the evidence while conducting its re-
view.” Appellant’s Br. 11 (citing, e.g., Stinson, 92 F.4th
at 1360–66).
Mr. Conyers urges that the Board, rather than the Vet-
erans Court, should have performed the constructive pos-
session analysis on the documents Mr. Conyers sought to
add to the administrative record. See Appellant’s
Br. 12–14. We disagree. The question of whether the
Board had constructive possession of the requested docu-
ments “is a question for the Veterans Court.” Conyers I,
91 F.4th at 1172. The Veterans Court was not legally re-
quired to remand the case to the Board, as the Veterans
Court routinely decides whether the Board constructively
possessed documents. See Euzebio II, 989 F.3d at 1318 (“In
keeping with its appellate review of Board and VA deter-
minations, the Veterans Court may, under certain circum-
stances, consider ‘documents that were not literally before
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CONYERS v. COLLINS 8
an examiner to be constructively part of a claimant’s rec-
ord.’” (citation omitted)). We therefore affirm the Veterans
Court regarding this portion of Mr. Conyers’s appeal.
Finally, we turn to Mr. Conyers’s argument that the
Veterans Court violated his due process rights. Appellant’s
Br. 32–38. Mr. Conyers argues the Veterans Court “denied
[him] a full and fair hearing when [it] predicated its single-
judge memorandum decision on the merits of the underly-
ing . . . VR&E claim and administrative appeal on an in-
complete record of proceedings” since the Veterans Court
allegedly “precluded relevant evidence that was actually
and constructively before the Secretary, the Board, and
[the] Board Chairman.” Appellant’s Br. 34. As stated pre-
viously, we see no error with the legal standard applied by
the Veterans Court to its constructive possession analysis,
and the Veterans Court’s application of that standard to
the facts of Mr. Conyers’s case is beyond our jurisdiction.
And to the extent Mr. Conyers has put a “due process” label
on his contention that the Veterans Court improperly ex-
cluded documents from the administrative record through
its constructive possession analysis, “his claim is constitu-
tional in name only.” Helfer v. West, 174 F.3d 1332, 1335
(Fed. Cir. 1999). Mr. Conyers’s characterization of this is-
sue “as constitutional in nature does not confer upon us ju-
risdiction that we otherwise lack.” Id. We therefore lack
jurisdiction to consider this portion of Mr. Conyers’s ap-
peal.
CONCLUSION
We have considered Mr. Conyers’s remaining argu-
ments but find them unpersuasive. For the foregoing rea-
sons, we affirm.
AFFIRMED
COSTS
No costs.
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