South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog

A client of mine who is also a distinguished combat veteran brought to my attention a bill pending in Congress that would establish a grant program to create veteran treatment courts based on the drug court model.

“These treatment courts will address the specific challenges with drugs and alcohol too many veterans face when returning home from their honorable service overseas,” said Senator John Kerry. “For those who have given so much for our country, we should address the serious issues of drug and alcohol addiction in an appropriate forum that recognizes that some veterans fall victim to substance abuse as a way to handle post-traumatic stress. It’s well past time we offered our veterans services worthy of their sacrifice.”

The SERV Act would authorize an annual $25 million for courts wanting to establish either a veteran's treatment court or to serve veterans through an existing drug court.

Horry County and other counties in South Carolina have employed drug court programs with mixed success. I've commented on our drug courts before:

Horry County Drug Court has been praised as a success. It is a wonderful idea, and in theory it should divert many people away from the prison system. I think we all want the drug court, and the proposed middle court expansion, to work, but we need to step back and take a look at what is happening in drug court:

1) Some people are finishing the program, remaining drug free, and avoiding prison to boot. These are the success stories that we want to hear about. Horry County's drug court began in August of 2005, and has graduated 12 people so far.

2) I am told that most people do not graduate, but I have not seen any numbers on how many have been admitted and how many have flunked out, other than only 12 have graduated in the past 3 years.

3) Before being admitted into the program, the defendant must plead guilty, be sentenced, and then the sentence is deferred pending completion of the program.

4) To be admitted into the program, the defendant must waive any right to appeal or enjoin any decision of the drug court/ middle court judge, and the defendant must waive any right to post conviction relief.

5) If the defendant is dismissed from the program, the defendant does not receive any due process or hearing, and the full sentence is immediately imposed.

So I ask, if most people do not graduate from this program, is it promoting the rehabilitation and re-entry of non-violent offenders into society and reserving the state's prisons for dangerous offenders, or is it giving the prosecutors an easy out to obtain convictions and often lengthy sentences, without the terrible headache of appeals and PCR's? So far, it seems that this bill will not only serve to keep people in prison longer, but it will help the prosecutors to send more people there in the first place.

I am not saying that we should scrap the idea, but I do think that we should make sure that it is achieving its stated goals, and I don't think that this should be used as a way to get around defendant's due process rights.

And I would have the same concerns with a veteran's treatment court. Because the idea is to provide an alternative to incarceration for those who have served our country and are suffering for it, we do not want to put a system in place that only makes it easier to put veterans in prison instead of keeping them out of prison. Because the idea of a veteran's treatment court is to cope with issues specific to veterans, such as the combination of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and alcohol or drug abuse as coping mechanisms for the veteran, I believe that veteran's treatment courts, if established, should be separate from the existing drug courts.

I'm not saying we should not continue with the drug court experiment - I think that we should. We should expand and improve on the drug courts that we have, and create a separate veteran's court if funding becomes available for it. But I think that we need to be aware of the realities of drug court success/failure rates, and we need to constantly work to improve the system. I think that drug courts and veteran's courts are a hopeful first step in helping the pubic and the players in the justice system understand that some people who become caught up in the justice system need help and not punishment. It is a beginning.