After more than nine months of planning and discussion, Cole County's circuit court soon will offer a "veterans treatment court" as another alternative to prison, for some people facing criminal charges.
When it begins operations in about two months, Cole County's court will be the seventh veterans court in the state, and second in Mid-Missouri to Boone County's program.
"The Veterans Court is a way for any veteran who (has) legal problems," Presiding Circuit Judge Pat Joyce explained Wednesday afternoon. "Instead of treating them normally through the criminal system - where they don't get the services they need - what we'll do is put them into a specialty court where they will have treatment through the Veterans Administration."
Officials in Osage and Morgan counties have agreed to send qualifying veterans to the Cole County program, and other area officials are considering similar arrangements.
Joyce has presided over Cole County's drug- and DWI-courts since 1999.
Like those other alternative treatment programs, she said, people will be screened before being accepted into the Veterans Court. Once accepted, they should expect to spend about 15 months "seeing us regularly, in court," Joyce said. "They will be seeing the probation officer regularly. They'll be getting all kinds of help within the system - the veterans' service organizations will be mentors.
"They've made the commitment that there will be some veteran who will walk with every new veteran - to get them through the problems they're having, help them get where they need to go and address all these issues," she said.
Veterans often have special needs and issues that traditional treatment courts don't handle, Joyce said, including service-connected experiences that cause personality changes, or change the way they react to stressful situations.
Gen. David Newman, the Missouri National Guard's chief of the joint staff, said they back the program because it may help some in the 13,000-member Guard save military careers that, in the past, would have been trashed by a conviction or even just an accusation of wrong-doing.
University of Missouri Law School student Shawn M. Lee works with the Veterans Clinic in Columbia.
"We face a broad range of legal issues at the Veterans Clinic," he said. "We try to find cases that we can help with that students can learn a lot from.
"And that will help create more legal advocates for veterans."
Those advocates will be needed more and more, he said, since research shows the nation could see "400,000 to 500,000 veterans in the court system with criminal charges within the next decade."
Missouri alone has about 500,000 veterans living in the state.
"This is the perfect place to start the healing that is going to be necessary," Lee said.
He had a traumatic brain injury and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) when he left his military service, and he also suffers from epileptic seizures.
Lee, who has a service dog, thinks the Veterans Court has a chance to partner with the Corrections department's "Puppies for Parole" program to get more service dogs for veterans who need them.
"It's an, overall, great social lubricant to get a veteran back out into society, back into work and back to being productive," he said.
Joyce announced the program's launch with representatives from several interested groups and agencies looking on.
Larry Henry, the treatment courts administrator, said: "This is, definitely, a joint effort - a very great cause.
"And we owe it to our vets to make sure that they're getting the services that they need, once they come back from overseas, from the different wars they've participated in."