Miguel Fernandez stands at the podium, facing a courtroom full to near capacity. He is a small man, with a soft, boyish face framed by sparkling earrings and dark, styled hair. He starts into a speech, hastily prepared just minutes earlier. “I took a lot of things for granted,” he begins. He thanks the court. He compliments the judge. He talks about his girlfriend and his family. “I put them through hell,” he says, his voice choked as he begins to cry. He crumples some tissues and puts them back in his pocket. “I don’t need those,” he says, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Real men cry.”

The courtroom breaks into laughter.

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It’s graduation day at Queens Mental Health Court, and Miguel Fernandez is the first “client” – as offenders in the city’s mental health court system are called – to complete the court’s year-long therapeutic program. Located on the third floor of the Queens Supreme Court in Kew Gardens, this specialized part of the criminal court has handled about 20 cases since opening just over a year ago. It officially celebrated its inception last week, however, to coincide with the graduation of the court’s first two clients.

These graduates spent the previous year in a court-mandated treatment program, requiring them to attend therapy sessions, take their medication, and show up for scheduled court appearances – sometimes as often as two or three times a month. In completing the program, they each earn a certificate to acknowledge their success, a round of applause and, from the district attorney’s office, a dismissal of the indictments against them.

The Queens mental health court is part of a growing “problem-solving justice” movement that, since the late 1990s, has been responsible for opening more than 150 mental health courts across the country, according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice. Presided over by Judge Marcia Hirsch, it is the third to open in New York City in the last five years, following similar courts in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The Criminal Justice/Mental Health Consensus Project, organized in 1999 by the Council of State Governments, describes the courts as having been “developed in response to the overrepresentation of people with mental illnesses in the criminal justice system.”

“As far as the kinds of problem-solving courts, probably the mental health court was, in many ways, the most difficult to start up and, for some people, the most controversial,” said Judge Judy Harris Kluger, the deputy chief administrative judge who oversees court reform and specialized court projects for New York state. She spoke at the opening ceremony on Dec. 6. “Because we all know, sometimes in the criminal justice system, as in the world at large, people with mental illness evoke fear in others.”

“The easy thing might be, if someone commits a crime and suffers from mental illness, to say, ‘Well, jail is the appropriate place for them to be,’” said Kluger, “but we came to realize with a lot of good thought and knowledge, that jail was not the place for most people who suffer with mental illness to be.”

Though each mental health court functions somewhat differently, they are all called “jail diversion programs” because they take offenders who would otherwise be incarcerated and divert them to community-based treatment. After clients are referred by the prosecutor’s office, they are evaluated and the court staff designs a treatment program. Some enter a residential treatment program, others live in their own homes. Before being accepted into the court, the victim of the client’s offense has to agree that the offender belongs in mental health court, instead of regular criminal court.