Fargo Opens North Dakota's Second Veterans Treatment Court

Veterans and court officials gathered at the Cass County Courthouse in Fargo on Friday, Oct. 9, for the ceremonial opening of North Dakota's second Veterans Treatment Court — a program that began taking participants last month and gives veterans facing criminal charges a treatment path instead of a cell.

The court operates out of East Central District Court and joins the program in Grand Forks, which opened in 2023. Veterans who qualify choose to participate. They follow a treatment plan, appear regularly before a judge, and work with veteran mentors who have navigated military life and, in many cases, the same systems their mentees are now entering.

What the court does that a criminal docket does not

Veterans Treatment Courts are a specialized docket model that dates to 2008, when the first such court was created. The premise is that a substantial share of justice-involved veterans arrive with service-connected conditions — post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, substance use disorder — that a conventional plea-and-sentence process is not built to address. The Department of Veterans Affairs coordinates a national network of the courts through its Homeless Programs Office, and the docket combines judicial supervision with clinical treatment and peer mentorship rather than substituting one for the others.

In Fargo, that pairing is literal. Participants meet with a judge on a recurring schedule and are matched with veteran mentors, an arrangement intended to supply the accountability of a court appearance alongside the credibility of someone who has served. Staff also screen veterans who are in jail to determine whether they are eligible for the program, and the court's coordinator works with the presiding judges and court clerks to route qualifying cases into it.

"Support and the acceptance of their community"

North Dakota Supreme Court Chief Justice Lisa Fair McEvers used the ceremony to argue that the program's value extends past the people enrolled in it. "As the veterans work this program, I hope that they feel the support and the acceptance of their community. And I challenge the community, all of us here, to support this program," McEvers said.

The ceremony included remarks from Fargo's director of veterans affairs, Brent Pharis, and a keynote from Tom Krabbenhoft. Judges Constance Cleveland and Stephanie Hayden, who preside over the docket, mingled with attendees after the ribbon was cut.

The program's budget and caseload will be shaped by who is referred. Veterans treatment courts generally take cases where the underlying charge is tied to untreated trauma or addiction, and they accept participants on a voluntary basis — a design that makes them dependent on referral practices by local judges and prosecutors as much as on the treatment capacity behind them. Grand Forks has provided the state's working template since its court opened in 2023.

The same week, a second ribbon in upstate New York

Fargo was not the only jurisdiction adding a veterans docket last week. On Wednesday, Oct. 7, Oneida County in upstate New York cut the ribbon on its own Veterans Treatment Court in Utica, ending what the county's presiding judge described as a three-year effort to get it running.

The court, led by Judge Joseph Saba, will screen veterans at arraignment. "If they're a veteran and they qualify, they will come to Veterans Court," Saba said, adding that referrals can also come from town and village judges. Successful completion can reduce a charge — Saba offered the example of a petit larceny being knocked down to simple trespass or dismissed — while failure to complete treatment can result in incarceration. The first session is scheduled for Oct. 14, with the court sitting on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month and more often when needed.

Saba said the design reflects a population that arrives with a different set of problems. "They could have PTSD from service; they could have substance abuse, mental health issues," he said. "So, our program, the Veterans Court, is specifically designed to address those issues with those men and women who served our country."

The two openings land in the same policy window that produced a Senate hearing earlier this year on expanding the courts and restoring VA benefits access for incarcerated veterans. For jurisdictions weighing the model, the open question is less whether treatment courts work for this population than whether the referral pipeline and the community treatment capacity behind it — medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, counseling and peer support for the rest — arrive in time to keep caseloads inside the dockets that create them.