Senate Resolution 196 — Evolving Veterans Justice
Senator Coleman’s Office Talks About a Study of the Unified Judicial System and Justice-Involved Veterans
Substituting for Senator Coleman of Pennsylvania District 16, Leo Knepper, his chief of staff, spoke to the Lehigh Valley Military Affairs Council on 16 October regarding SR 196 passed this June, “[a] Resolution directing the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing to conduct a thorough and comprehensive study on the effects that post-traumatic stress disorder or injury, military sexual trauma and traumatic brain injury have on service members, veterans and their families who are directly or indirectly involved or implicated in any portion or component of the criminal justice system.” In other words, he spoke about a review of Pennsylvania’s unified judicial system in regard to its performance in the handling of justice-involved veterans — particularly in identifying those veterans who appear before its Courts of Common Pleas, the courts’ determination of whether or not they suffer with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) or TBI (traumatic brain injury), and their consequent disposition and treatment in the criminal justice system. The completed study is due about this time next year.
The thoroughness of the study, led by the Commission on Sentencing requires the involvement of the Attorney General’s office, the Departments of Corrections and Military and Veterans Affairs, the Commission on Crime and Delinquency in addition to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts and the federal government (Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs). It involves the review of about 500,000 records between the years of 2016 and 2021, the best available records database according to Mr. Knepper. The effort will be labor intensive because the Unified Judicial system has never “tagged” veterans in its database of cases. In effect, this is a landmark study which has never been done before on the behalf of veterans. It recognizes that veterans justice involves more than properly processing “pieces of paper, but lives.”
Already known that Veterans Treatment courts, a specialty diversion court of Courts of Common Pleas are not available statewide and lack uniformity in their operations; and that pre-sentencing procedures often fail veterans, especially in as system predisposed to plea deals and affected by budgetary shortfalls. Additionally, PTSD and TBI are not currently considered in the state’s sentencing matrix, important to case disposition. The analysis should hopefully lead to significant improvements in the criminal justice system where military veterans are involved.
The briefing was, therefore, eye opening. For more details and information see the slides used for the briefing below:
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As of 17 October 2024