In the early 1990s, a Delaware judge sought to address the significant number of defendants with substance abuse issues appearing before him and proposed the novel idea of a separate court for drug offenders. Although the idea took some trial and error, 20 years later the program has expanded into all three counties and helped roughly 3,800 individuals receive much-needed treatment.
“I put one guy in prison for three years on a drug trafficking charge and once he was out, he was back in front of me within four months,” said Richard S. Gebelein, a former Superior Court judge and now a partner at Bifferato LLC. “I asked him why he would reoffend so quickly after he got out and he said all he could think about during his last six months in prison was getting high once he got out. It was obvious we were not addressing the underlying problems these people had.”
