Courts urged to consider vets' trauma

A loose coalition of activist veterans, private foundations, government health care workers and justice system officials is forming to create or lobby for initiatives aimed at taking war-related trauma into account during the sentencing of veterans who commit nonviolent crimes. There are no national statistics on the prevalence of crimes committed by troubled war veterans. And no one is arguing for going easy on those who commit violent crimes. But the punishment for crimes committed by war vets in which no others are physically harmed–such as drug possession and driving while intoxicated–should be leavened with the knowledge of what the vets have gone through and the treatment they still could lack, argues Army veteran and former social worker Guy Gambill, a Minnesota-based consultant on veterans issues. Such mitigating factors are taken into account in a growing school of legal thought known as therapeutic jurisprudence, in which judges get more discretion in sentencing and options to place offenders in treatment rather than behind bars.