DRUG COURT: THE GOOD NEWS AND THE BAD NEWS

Hennepin County's drug court has cleared court dockets and steered a lot of
people toward treatment.

It's also allowed the county to push thousands more casual offenders into
the corrections system.

The weekend of May 11 was warm and mild, making the following Monday more
hectic than usual in Judge William Howard's courtroom. As the afternoon
session opens, the judge has nearly four dozen cases to dispose of, and
theoretically just three hours in which to do it.

A bailiff opens the glassed-in booth where people brought up from the jail
wait and lets out an Ethiopian man who, it quickly becomes apparent, only
speaks Oromo. There's no translator in the building, so the guy's brother,
who came to get him, is pressed into service. "You are charged with
possession of khat," the judge says, slowly. "The police searched your
house and they found it. This is the beginning of the process to find out
whether you have violated the law. The police say you have." Howard asks
the man's brother to tell him that he may be sent to a class where he will
learn that "khat is not okay for the United States," and gives him a date
to come back. Six friends trail him out of the courtroom.

The next man out of the holding area is charged with possessing .8 grams of
coke. He's dressed in a filthy T-shirt and rotting sweat pants, but has the
whitest tennis shoes imaginable. He's sent upstairs to undergo a chemical
dependency assessment administered by county public-health workers.

Then there's a man arrested for possessing 1.4 grams of coke. He has
another unresolved drug case, and therefore an attorney, but no one can
figure out when his lawyer will be here. The defense attorneys keep a group
calendar on their table, but someone spilled coffee on it. Howard orders
bail, which the defendant can't pay. He storms back into the holding area
and starts shouting and smashing things. After unloading their guns, three
bailiffs follow him.

A man shoots out of the in-custody booth and walks past the crowd and
toward the double doors at the front of the courtroom like some kind of
quick-stepping zombie. A bailiff tries to direct him back toward the
podium, but he turns instead toward the jury room on the other side of the
court. His hair is fashioned into four rows of little spikes, which gives
all of his bobbing and weaving a comical air and people are cracking up. At
the podium he can't get his hand to connect with the mic.

Eventually the sight of Howard brings him back to Earth. "How you doin'?"
he asks the judge.

The probation officer holding the man's file notes that his mother has
called and won't let him come home; his parents called the police because
he was threatening his father with a stun gun. When the officers found him
he was carrying 3.2 grams of crack. Howard asks for evaluations of his
mental health and medication regime--"I think we just witnessed some
behavior"--and sets bail at $3,000.

Welcome to the vanguard of Minnesota jurisprudence, Hennepin County
District Court's much-touted drug court: two courtrooms, three judges, and
a small roster of lawyers and probation officers who do nothing but deal
with drug offenders. They handle more than a fourth of all felonies filed
in Hennepin County. To their proponents, the harried people who work in
this room are on the cutting edge of something called therapeutic
jurisprudence. To detractors, they are helping increase the number of
people caught up in an ill-conceived war on drugs.

Drug court judges are supposed to rule their courtrooms with iron fists in
velvet gloves. Offenders check in often and undergo frequent urinalysis.
Missteps bring swift consequences, including lectures, "flash"
incarceration, and longer and longer jail stays. "Graduates" get a round of
applause.

Drug court's chief judge, Howard bears a striking resemblance to the late
Dave Thomas. He rockets from empathy to irritation. One or the other of his
arms is usually flung over a shoulder or his head, and the momentum from
their swinging seems to propel him around his raised seating area.
Sometimes he's flung back in his chair, sometimes he looms far over the
bench, as if looking for something he dropped on the floor.

Probably half the people appearing before him this afternoon were arrested
on bench warrants, meaning they missed a court appearance or otherwise
failed to comply with their sentences. An impressive number swear they
missed because of a funeral. A cousin in Indiana, a brother here in town, a
roommate, a mother-in-law: At one point, Howard quips to one of the public
defenders that she must be putting hexes on her clients.

One woman didn't show because she was in a battered women's program and was
scared that her boyfriend would pop up at her court appearance. After
Howard grants her bail, she makes a beeline for a guy in the audience. They
leave holding hands.

As the afternoon goes on, the pace becomes frenetic. Howard quickly hears
two more cases involving repeat offenders, and then that of a crack dealer
arrested on a bench warrant after skipping out of treatment. He's been to
treatment 28 times in the last 14 years, probation reports; their latest
recommendation is that he find a self-help group instead. The man's lawyer
protests that the treatment program the man just walked away from is
willing to take him back.

Howard seems angry now. He can't believe the program's administrators knew
the county wouldn't pay when they said they'd take the man back. The judge
stands up. "I need a minute," he mutters, disappearing into the hall.

When he gets back, he finds himself facing a tiny woman with a hard face.
She was picked up over the weekend on prostitution charges, she has seven
kids, and she wants to go home. Right away she begins pleading in a
little-girl voice. The probation officer opens her file: Since her drug
court case started in 2001, she's picked up 10 misdemeanors, ranging from
trespassing to prostitution. A local motel keeps complaining about her to
the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. None of which suggests that she's
straightening out, Howard says.

She starts to cry, but he doesn't budge. He wants her in jail during the
few days it'll take probation to come up with a new plan. She stalks out,
snarling.

"Ho-ass motherfucker."

Hundreds of drug courts have sprung up around the country in the last 10
years, a byproduct of the nation's war on drugs. The idea is to stop users
from cycling repeatedly through the system by reaching them in the hours
after their arrest--a so-called teachable moment when people are thought to
be especially open to chemical-dependency treatment. The hoped-for result:
unclogged dockets and fewer tax dollars spent on prisons.

In the seven years since its inception, Hennepin County's drug court has
indeed increased the pace at which narcotics cases are processed. Whereas
drug cases used to drag on for months, most are now resolved within a few
weeks.

But instead of making less work for the courts, the increased efficiency
has made it possible for prosecutors to charge 50 percent more people, most
of them minorities from a handful of Minneapolis neighborhoods caught with
small amounts of a variety of drugs. And while most of the defendants who
pass through this court are offered treatment and other help to get clean,
the reality is that many will go back to using drugs. And when they do,
that's hundreds more people who have criminal records in an era when being
convicted of a drug felony carries sanctions not even attached to murder.

Between 1980 and 2000 there was a 1,000 percent increase in the number of
drug offenders in state prisons, from 19,000 to 220,000. In 1980, some
52,000 people, or just 8 percent of the nation's inmates, were incarcerated
for drug law violations. Today, one-fourth of the more than 2 million
people behind bars are there for drug offenses.

Mandatory sentencing laws passed in the late '80s and early '90s have meant
drastically longer prison terms for even casual users. The average drug
offender released from a federal prison in 1992 was there for 33 months;
the average offender convicted that year could expect to spend 70 months
incarcerated. In 1995, it cost taxpayers some $9 billion to keep all of
these people locked up.

Contrary to its liberal reputation, Minnesota has not been an exception.
From 1986 to 1996, the year before drug court began, the number of state
prison inmates with a drug offense as their highest charge went from 2
percent, or 34, to 10 percent, or 505. From 1993 to 1996, about 1,200
felony drug cases were filed in Hennepin County each year. The numbers
threatened to bring the criminal justice system to a halt and drain public
coffers.

In an attempt to resolve the impasse between politicians' tough-on-crime
stances and the realities of trying to deal with the resulting flood of
convicts, other cities had started drug courts. Hennepin County was already
trying to divert some drug offenders into treatment when Chief Judge Kevin
Burke crusaded to start a drug court here. The purpose, he told the
Minneapolis City Council, was to make the system "work radically faster,"
the Star Tribune reported.

At the time, the first drug court had been in operation in Miami for five
years and dozens more had sprung up in other states. Burke and the task
force that helped set up the local drug court were aware of their
shortcomings, and aimed high. As Hennepin County prepared to process its
first defendants, doubts were waved aside. We were going to have "one of
the good ones," organizers promised.

Whereas most drug courts won't take cases involving dealers, weapons, or in
some cases even repeat offenders, Hennepin County decided to take every
narcotics case except those in which the defendant was charged with a
violent act. Further, recognizing that drug abuse doesn't crop up in a
vacuum, the court arranged for an array of services for participants. In
addition to treatment, defendants get help with mental health issues,
housing, education, and parenting skills.

Possibly the most important distinction between Hennepin County's court and
the others is transparent to most non-lawyers, however. To participate in
most drug courts, defendants must agree to plead guilty and to surrender
many, or in some cases all, of their rights. Not so here: Defendants can
undergo screening and begin treatment, if it's appropriate, while retaining
their right to challenge their police stop or even to go to trial. (Rights
notwithstanding, less than half a percent of drug court clients end up at
trial. More than 95 percent end up pleading guilty; the rest have their
cases dismissed.)

From the start, the court got great press. A Star Tribune story written
during its first few days of operation profiled a man who had gone to great
pains to get himself arrested so that he could avail himself of the court's
referral to county-financed treatment. Not counting the expense of
treatment (which is paid for out of an already existing federal fund), the
court's budget was $1 million, more than half of it from county coffers.
Costs, supporters promised, would go down as fewer drug users re-offended.

Even as the court was being celebrated, though, the number of drug-related
felonies filed in Hennepin County was skyrocketing. In 1996, about 1,200
such cases were filed. In 1997, the number shot up 50 percent to 1,788;
it's hovered between 1,600 and 1,850 ever since then. About 75 percent of
defendants are African American; most are arrested in Minneapolis's poorer
neighborhoods.

An increase in zero-tolerance policing strategies such as Minneapolis's
CODEFOR is partially responsible for the increase in prosecutions. But at
least as big a factor, critics say, is drug court's efficiency. Under the
old system, narcotics cases weren't a priority. It used to take six to nine
months to resolve a drug case. But the advent of drug court has created
teams of attorneys, police, and other court workers who are better at
making narcotics cases stick, according to the people who work there. As a
result, today, four weeks is typical of the length of time it takes to
resolve a case.

"Prosecutors and police have had a learning curve," explains Judge Howard.
"The prosecutors tell police, 'Okay, you have to do this next time if you
want me to charge your cases.' It isn't that there are so many more cases.
It's that they've learned how to do them better." Defense attorneys agree,
noting that they're seeing fewer bad police stops.

While the increase in numbers of arrests hasn't been as dramatic as the
increase in prosecutions, police are arresting more users. State and
federal records show that the arrest rates in Minneapolis and Hennepin
County went up 17 and 10 percent, respectively, in 1997.

But according to drug court statistics, those arrests aren't scooping up
dealers, either. Some 60 percent of drug court cases are fifth-degree
felonies--the kind of low-level possession cases that police and
prosecutors used to be quicker to let go of.

"In 1996, if you got stopped and patted down and had a rock, my guess is
the police officer might arrest you and charge you with fifth-degree
possession," says Leonardo Castro, chief public defender for Hennepin
County. "Or because they know you're an addict, know this is your problem,
do they take your rock away? Stomp it on the ground? Or does the county
attorney decide not to charge you? In 1997, did we have more people on the
streets? My guess is not.

"Part of the idea is, now we can get people treatment, so we're charging
more people because we think we can help," he continues. "But if the
numbers are staying constant, then something's not working."

From where Castro sits, the biggest problem comes when someone "flunks"
drug court. "What about the guy who comes in, goes through treatment, then
three months later tests positive? He gets another chance, flunks, repeats,
and then finally the judge says, 'Sorry, I'm going to have to send you to
prison.' So now he has a felony record."

And once someone has a drug felony on his record, rehabilitation becomes a
nightmare. Aside from the usual barriers encountered by convicts--trouble
getting jobs and apartments, for instance--drug offenders face a special
set of ongoing sanctions. They cannot live in or visit someone in public
housing. They are not eligible for federal educational aid, for food
stamps, or any of the last vestiges of welfare.

"Employers don't distinguish between people who went to prison and people
who have an addiction," notes Howard. "Rapists getting out of Stillwater
can get a Pell Grant, while a kid on diversion can't get any education
money unless it's from the school itself. That's where the system really
needs to look."

And these days, it doesn't take a very large stash of drugs to end up
charged with a felony: 42.5 grams of marijuana is a fifth-degree felony in
Minnesota, as is possession of any amount of cocaine or crack, or of other
illicit narcotics. In 1991, 500 fifth-degree cases were filed in Hennepin
County; today there are almost twice as many.

"The level of criminalization is a decision made by the state Legislature
and Congress. Why felonize those cases?" asks Howard. "Those are
essentially political questions about things that I cannot change. All I
can do is try to ameliorate what's in front of me. The reality is that
although we have a bottleneck, we are going to be far worse off if we don't
deal with them."

Even so, he says, he still finds drug court "the most hopeful place in the
building." "Treatment does work. Does it work all the time? No, but that's
the way society is," says Howard. "We can't afford to put as many people in
prison and on the ash heap as we are."

Juvenile court Judge Tanja Manrique is filling in for Howard, who is at a
conference. Drug Court II, as it's known informally, is a much smaller
courtroom, and it's library-quiet. All eyes are on Manrique, who is
conducting "review"--talking with participants who are under court order to
check in on a regular basis. It helps that she's a stone fox with a soft,
feminine voice. When she speaks, everyone strains to hear.

Right now, she's talking to a man whose last scheduled urinalysis turned up
diluted. She sends him upstairs for an "instant." Then she turns her
attention to a heroin addict who is supposed to report to the workhouse for
a 60-day stay. He's had a tough couple of weeks and relapsed. He doesn't
want to go back in the workhouse on methadone, so he's asking the judge to
send him to detox for a few days first.

Halfway through trying to explain all of this, the man's shoulders crumple.
He looks up at Manrique and says simply, "I need help." Court workers pick
up his story where he stumbled, filling in the details.

People on methadone pose an enormous challenge to drug court.
Theoretically, they can leave the workhouse daily to get their dose from
one of several Twin Cities methadone clinics, but in practice this doesn't
work so well. Inmates can't leave the workhouse on weekends, and if the
slightest thing goes wrong--if they're late getting out or if a guard who's
never heard of drug court decides their paperwork has an undotted i--they
can lose their slot at the methadone clinic, sometimes permanently. The
judge has to anticipate every potential catch-22.

It's a minor hassle, five minutes of Manrique's day. But it's an
instructive look at a moment in what's been dubbed "therapeutic
jurisprudence," where a judge gets personally involved with a defendant's
rehabilitation. "Participants in the drug court movement believe that
success is due in large part to direct judicial involvement with offenders,
provided on a regular basis," writes Richard Gebelein, the judge who
founded Delaware's drug court, in a policy paper published by the National
Institute of Justice. "It is likely that judges who have been successful
with the approach will want to apply it to other areas."

Judges wield a lot of power, but typically do so in narrowly defined ways.
They set the parameters for the arguments advanced during trials. They
listen to the interpretations of the law advanced by attorneys and decide
who's right. They sentence the guilty. But they can only judge the cases
prosecutors present them, and more and more, recently, they can only apply
punishments established by politicians.

"Some of us, in our hearts, like to do social work, too," admits Howard, a
fervent believer in treatment's possibilities. "Most of these folks are
retrievable."

In most drug courts, judges and attorneys are supposed to work as members
of a team. This presents ethical dilemmas for most participants. Judges are
expected to balance their personal involvement with defendants with
impartiality. Prosecutors are supposed to safeguard public safety, not seek
to give offenders every chance at rehabilitation.

Defense attorneys arguably face the most serious ethical quandaries,
however. In many courts they are expected to convince their clients to
waive their rights and plead guilty in exchange for a chance at treatment.
Hennepin County doesn't do this, which makes local defenders more
comfortable. But the collaborative approach is still often dicey, in the
opinion of chief Public Defender Castro. "We advocate for people, and
sometimes what they want is not in their best interests," he explains.
"We're not set up to be problem-solvers, we're set up to be advocates
fighting within rules."

Moreover, the further the U.S. justice system moves from the goal of
rehabilitation, the more dangerous the collaborative approach becomes, he
argues. The judges who've presided over the local drug court so far have
done so with dignity and, for the most part, respect for all participants.
But what happens when there's no Judge Howard, with his secret yen to do
social work? "You've got a problem," Castro says, "every time a court is
personality-based."

As an example, Castro recalls the situation a couple of years ago in Drug
Court II. When Castro took over as public defender in 2001, offenders would
appear in review court alone, without an attorney. That might be all right
if they were simply reporting that treatment was proceeding apace, he says,
but what about people who were flunking? Who were being sent to jail, or
having their sentences changed?

Castro was appalled. But with offenders sometimes making weekly
appearances, his office doesn't have the resources to make sure attorneys
are by their sides. Eventually, he assigned several dispositional
advisers--the public defender's answer to a social worker or probation
officer--to take turns sitting in the court to advocate when something went
wrong or to run next door to Drug Court I to alert a public defender.

The rights of the accused aren't a popular topic these days, though, and
concerns such as Castro's haven't gotten nearly as much press as drug
court's efficiency in clearing clogged dockets. As a result, in the 12
years since the first drug court opened, government agencies throughout the
country have experimented with applying the "problem-solving court" model
to other social issues.

Each of the courts has a slightly different purpose: Domestic violence
courts are supposed to give victims a greater role; mental health calendars
are supposed to steer people with mental illnesses toward the services they
need to avoid repeatedly running afoul of the system; community courts are
supposed to make neighborhoods aware that law enforcement and prosecutors
are dealing with livability crimes. The U.S. Department of Justice has even
proposed the creation of re-entry courts, where parolees would receive more
intensive supervision.

The seemingly limitless expansion of the "problem-solving court," critics
warn, will continue to "widen the net of social control." Their fears are
based on the time-tested legal theory that new sanctions beget bigger
systems, which in turn hand out even more sanctions. The classic example of
this is juvenile court. A hundred years ago, truancy and other minor
offenses committed by young people were usually worked out by parents,
teachers, and, in the worst cases, the neighborhood beat cop. Then came
juvenile courts, which were supposed to function as guidance agencies.
Partly because the new courts were seen as benevolent, more and more kids
have been funneled into them ever since.

Hennepin County Assistant Public Defender Dave Murrin was a member of the
task force that created drug court. Even back then, he predicted that the
court would create more and more drug cases. "My general feeling was that
if you created a court, you're going to have more people using it," he
recalls. "It generates its own business simply by being available."

It's not hard to drum up that business, either. When he was assigned to
drug court, Howard spent an evening with police patrolling Minneapolis's
"open-air drug markets." "We picked up three people at the exact same spot
within 45 minutes," he recalls. "You have to understand how easy it is for
police to bring these people in."

Which explains why too many poor minorities cycle through the court, he
says. "The people who are the most blatant in their drug sales are the ones
who go down first," explains Howard. "It's harder to infiltrate a bar in
the suburbs than to go bust dealers on the corner, who you can see. Police
work is sometimes based on opportunity."

From there, it's not much of a stretch to see the war on drugs as the
ultimate exercise in net widening. "After all, imprisonment is a potent
form of social control, one that, in this country, continues far beyond
prison walls, or even the probation officer's building," writes civil
liberties attorney Elaine Cassel. "Chances are you already--or soon
will--know someone who cannot get a job, rent a house, drive a car, or vote
because he or she had a criminal conviction once in their lifetime.

"In 2003, more than 615,000 prisoners will attempt to re-enter society, and
some of the strongest obstacles to their doing so will have been erected by
their own government," she notes in an essay for the CounterPunch
newsletter. "Released inmates who want to make a life for themselves will
be systematically denied the opportunity to do so. As a result, recidivism,
which keeps the prison economy flourishing and exponentially adds to the
numbers of underclass citizens, will be assured."

When drug court opened for business, one number dropped right away--the
number of serious, first- and second-degree felonies filed in Hennepin
County courts. Concerned that drug court would not deal harshly enough with
large-scale dealers, then-County Attorney Mike Freeman began channeling the
biggest cases to local federal courts.

"The fed system is a good route for the people whose motivation is greed,"
said Freeman, who diverted five or six cases a month. "We in the state have
never figured out a treatment program for recovering drug entrepreneurs."
The number of cases filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota jumped
accordingly.

Freeman's wasn't an isolated fear. During drug court's first two years,
what little criticism there was focused on the perception that it was too
soft on offenders. In response, Kevin Burke, then the court's lone judge,
released statistics showing that he had sent more drug offenders to prison
than traditional courts, and that more than half of participants completed
treatment. Still, Burke faced criticism from prosecutors and from the
county commissioners who had voted to fund the court for imposing prison
sentences for less time than state guidelines called for.

Evaluating the court's success hasn't gotten any easier in the intervening
years, not least because everyone seems to have a different definition of
success. Gail Baez, the assistant county attorney in charge of drug court
prosecutors, says too many community members still complain about the
effects drug-related crimes have on their neighborhoods. Dennis Miller, the
head probation officer, is pleased with even the small changes he sees in
the lives of individual offenders.

And what about a former crack user who now only smokes marijuana, asks Todd
Barnette, the attorney who heads the team of public defenders assigned to
the court. Or someone who was clean for three years and then relapsed? Can
we decree them successes?

And the courts' backers expect early enthusiasm to wane as the model is
expanded. "As the results of more sophisticated evaluations become
available, preliminary success rates will not be sustained," Richard
Gebelein, the judge who founded Delaware's drug courts, wrote in a recent
policy paper for the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of
Justice. "As less tractable groups participate, rates of compliance and
graduation will decline and recidivism will rise. Support may fade and
success appears to diminish. The movement cannot afford to claim too much
and so must define success realistically."

Even as the number of participants grows, Gebelein adds, most local
governments will expect drug courts to get by using the same resources:
"The usual result is deterioration of treatment quality as programs are
shortened and more people are crowded into each group. This can only
decrease effectiveness."

Further, he notes, the health care system could chip away at the courts'
success. "The premise of managed care, increasingly the norm, is that the
least treatment required should be provided," he writes. "This is at odds
with research on substance abuse treatment, which has shown that the longer
a person remains in treatment, the more successful treatment will be.
Furthermore, managed care assumes the patient will aggressively pursue the
treatment he or she deems necessary. Because drug court clients initially
prefer not to be treated, they are likely to welcome a ruling by the health
care provider or the managed care insurer that treatment is needed."

(This raises an interesting aside: Very few Hennepin County drug court
participants have health insurance--probably as a result of the
differential policing that's responsible for the bulk of the narcotics
caseload. Those who do have health care are sent to their insurance
companies for chemical dependency assessments. If treatment is indicated,
defendants must then hope their insurer agrees to pay for it.)

One person who's willing to declare the courts a categorical failure is
Bill McColl, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance.
"Drug courts have not slowed expansion into prisons," he asserts. "And as
they have expanded, they have pulled in a large number of people who were
not otherwise caught up in the criminal justice system."

McColl is not mollified that those additional felons have better access to
treatment. "It's not just half a loaf, it's a loaf that's diverting
attention and resources from community programs," he argues. "Yeah, it
kinda works, sort of. But not as well as [other] options.

"Where we choose to pigeonhole this makes a difference," he says, opining
that the public health system is the place where we should be dealing with
addiction. "The criminal justice system had become a revolving door for
many of these people. But with the drug courts we're building an ever more
baroque system for dealing with these types of health problems."

In recent years, several Western European nations have decriminalized
marijuana, and in coming weeks Britain will reduce penalties as well. Last
month, Canada's ruling Liberal Party proposed decriminalizing the
possession of up to 15 grams of marijuana. Suggesting that pot smoking is
largely a public health issue, party officials suggested that possession of
small amounts of marijuana should be punished with a ticket.

In response, however, Bush Administration anti-drug officials described
Canada as "a dangerous staging area for some of the most dangerous
marijuana," according to a New York Times article by Eric Schlosser, author
of Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market.

"Meanwhile, the United States has escalated its war on pot," Schlosser
writes. "The number of marijuana arrests now approaches three-quarters of a
million annually, largely for simple possession. More people are in prison
for marijuana crimes today than ever before. Dozens, if not hundreds, are
serving life sentences for nonviolent pot offenses. Attorney General John
Ashcroft has called for full enforcement of the pot laws and spearheaded a
crackdown on medicinal marijuana providers in California, though their
efforts are legal under state law."

Judge John Sommerville's afternoon in drug court had been about as long as
they get. He'd dealt with several dozen garden-variety appearances: new
cases, people who skipped court dates and had to be rearrested, defendants
who somehow hadn't managed the trip from the courthouse to their treatment
provider.

He'd also seen another schizophrenic threatening his family, and tried to
field questions about a defendant who didn't show because she was in the
hospital following a jailhouse suicide attempt. Jail officials were said to
be trying to figure out how to release her in absentia so that they
wouldn't have to pay her medical bills. By 4:30 p.m. a scowl appeared
permanently etched onto Sommerville's face.

His clerk surveyed the half-dozen people still seated in the audience.
"Anybody else here who is waiting to be called?"

A chubby young black man stands. He's completed all but one of the terms of
his sentence. If he's allowed to pay a small fine today, his case will go
on administrative probation. That means that if he stays out of trouble for
a couple of years he'll be free and can have his record wiped clean.

The judge briefly considers having the man come back in the morning, but
changes his mind. This is, after all, the moment drug court is supposed to
be all about. The clerks, attorneys, and probation officers sit silently
while the man runs down the hall. He comes back about 10 minutes later,
clutching a receipt.

Sommerville stands, and his robe slips off one shoulder, revealing a pink
shirt. He applauds, and everyone else follows his lead. "You should be
proud of yourself," he says to the young man before turning to climb down
off the bench. The court reporter picks up her equipment and follows the
bailiffs and attorneys back into the chambers.

Outside, the halls are deserted. The man looks around uncertainly, still
clutching the receipt. After a couple of minutes, he shuffles off toward
the elevator.