Wounded warriors and criminal justice

Veterans and service-members who break the law often confront two shortcomings in the state's criminal justice system. First, programs treating mental illness, traumatic brain injuries and substance abuse are underfunded and difficult to access. Second, the legislature has reduced the discretion of judges to handle special circumstances.

Del. Chris Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, and Sen. John Miller, D-Newport News, attempted to address those problems indirectly this year with a measure to provide modest help for Virginia's 800,000 veterans.

Their legislation permits the expansion of the Department of Veterans Services' Wounded Warrior program, which coordinates mental health treatment and rehabilitation, to include veterans convicted of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies. That expansion will occur only if local court systems volunteer to pay for the program themselves as a means to emphasize treatment as an alternative to incarceration.

Gov. Bob McDonnell should sign the bills into law, but with the recognition that more is needed. First, Virginia must help ensure that people suffering from mental illness have access to treatment. The legislature approved new money this winter to pay for behavioral health programs, but most of the funds will go toward services for individuals with intellectual disabilities.

That's undoubtedly necessary, and it should have been approved long before the U.S. Department of Justice threatened to sue. But there's a danger that federal intervention will draw attention and dollars away from mental health services. McDonnell and lawmakers must demonstrate their commitment to adequately fund both mental health and intellectual disability programs.

Second, lawmakers should admit that they have made a mess of the criminal justice system when they adopt laws requiring mandatory minimum sentences for everything from violent crimes to misdemeanors.

The first mandatory minimum statute was approved in 1968, but today there are more than 80. Some judges have simply ignored those laws, but many feel boxed in when they are attempting to address special circumstances.

Critics of the bills sponsored by Stolle and Miller said they don't want to encourage special treatment for certain categories of criminal defendants.

But human beings don't leave their past at the courthouse door. Their wounds shouldn't absolve them of responsibility for their actions, but neither should their experiences be automatically deemed irrelevant. That's particularly true for the men and women injured as a direct result of service to their country.