When we celebrated the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recently, I thought of success stories here in Missouri.
Stories like those beginning in 1920 with the election of Republican state Rep. Walthall Moore and continuing through the 1960s with state Sen. Theodore McNeal, state Rep. DeVerne Calloway, state Rep. Leon Jordan and state Rep. Harold Holiday Sr.; through the 1970s with state Rep. Orchid Jordan and state Sen. Gwen Giles; and into the 1980s with state Sen. Lee Vertis Swinton – men and women who, across generations, cast their votes as Missouri’s first black legislators.
I also thought about Lloyd Gaines and Lucile Bluford, both of whom sought in the 1930s to become students at the University of Missouri. Their struggles helped lead to opportunities. In just the past decade, the university’s enrollment of African Americans alone has increased by more than 80 percent, and now nearly 20 percent of the university’s freshmen are minorities.
We in the judiciary are doing what we can to create more opportunities for people in Missouri to gain access to our courts. Thanks largely to grant funding, we are providing interpreters as needed in all criminal, family, domestic and juvenile cases.
The courts continue to try to make it easier and more affordable for people to file cases. The Supreme Court, all three districts of the court of appeals, and the circuit courts in Callaway and St. Charles counties are up and running in the Missouri eFiling System, and an additional 25 county circuit courts plan to join the system.
Although Judge Ray Price Jr. left the court last summer, his legacy remains. Thanks largely to his commitment to being “smart,” and not just “tough,” about the way we deal with those in the criminal justice system, we now have treatment court divisions serving all but two of our 45 judicial circuits.
With a graduation rate exceeding 50 percent, Missouri now has more than 12,000 graduates who successfully have completed treatment court programs. Nearly 600 drug-free babies have been born to treatment court participants.
One drug court graduate, Josh Palmer of Malden, was featured in a nationwide meth-prevention media campaign sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Josh’s first encounter with meth at 17 spiraled into a full-blown addiction that eventually cost him his job, his house and the trust of his family. Through the drug court program in Dunklin County, Josh was able to beat his addiction and turn his life around. He now lives with his wife and children and works as a substance abuse counselor for youth in Hayti.
Missouri’s treatment courts are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. One of the reasons we have drug courts in Missouri is because of the leadership of Albert Riederer – a former court of appeals judge and three-term Jackson County prosecutor – who died Dec. 27 after a courageous battle with cancer. While he was prosecutor, Albert spearheaded the effort to fund a drug court in Kansas City that was just the second in the country.
This model of providing treatment to certain nonviolent criminal offenders has moved beyond just drug courts. In 2010, state legislation made Missouri one of the first states in the nation to establish DWI courts.
And we now have three regional treatment courts serving the unique needs of our military veterans. One success story is Kennedy, who served in the U.S. Army in the 1980s and who, a decade later, fell into drug and alcohol abuse, leading to multiple arrests. Kennedy graduated from the St. Louis veterans treatment court this past September and now coordinates a computer clinic to help others in that program. The treatment court was his key to freedom from addiction and crime.
I know all of us on the Court firmly believe in our state’s motto – carved into the dais in this beautiful chamber – “Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.”
Edited from his State of the Judiciary address delivered Jan. 23 during a joint session of the General Assembly in Jefferson City.
Teitelman is chief justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri.
