Courts urged to consider vets’ trauma

Courts urged to consider vets’ trauma

By William H. McMichael - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Sep 12, 2009 10:35:12 EDT

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.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have produced hundreds of thousands of combat troops who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD.

read more here

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/09/airforce_vetsscourt_092109w/