Pubdate: Thu, 18 May 2006
Source: Times Union (Albany, NY)
Copyright: 2006 Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation
Contact: http://www.timesunion.com/forms/emaileditor.asp
Website: http://www.timesunion.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/452
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm 
(Harm Reduction)
Bookmark: 
http://www.mapinc.org/find?140 
(Rockefeller Drug Laws)

UNFINISHED REFORM

The Legislature Must Take Up Where It Left Off On The Rockefeller Era Drug Laws

The time passes ever so slowly for the forgotten victims of the 
failed Rockefeller Drug Laws. It was 33 years last week that New 
York, in its utter desperation, resorted to a harsh and unyielding 
approach to the problem of the sale of illegal drugs. And it's been 
17 months since the Legislature and the governor took the first steps 
toward mending that damage. Yet it was only last week as well that 
the state Assembly finally passed a bill that would extend drug law 
reform to more than 4,000 people in New York's prisons.

The great irony of the 2004 reform was that while it ended life 
sentences that often were imposed on those convicted of the most 
serious drug felonies, it ignored the 4,700 people incarcerated for 
less severe offenses. Those guilty of class B felonies can't appeal 
for resentencing based on the 2004 law.

It is of course laudable that the Assembly has passed legislation 
long pushed by Jeffrion Aubry, D-Queens, addressing such an inequity. 
But that still leaves the bill far from passage. The harsh truth is 
that the Assembly has always been more committed to drug law reform 
than the Senate or Governor Pataki. Failure of drug law reform to go 
any further will be more than another chapter in the dreary tale of 
the Legislature and its one-house bills. It's one more occasion to 
remind Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno of what he had to say in 
December 2004.

"There is more to be done, and we're going to get there."

Last week, his stance seemed just a bit different. "We are willing to 
address that," Mr. Bruno said of reforming the drug laws as they 
apply to class B offenders, "and review that and to make sure that 
justice is done."

The question is when. The 2004 law seems to have taken much of the 
pressure off the Legislature to continue to rewrite New York's failed 
drug laws. Yet every day, not to mention every legislative session, 
that the state's leaders duck the issue is best measured this way -- 
as time when drug felons could be getting the treatment Mr. Aubry's 
bill provides for, rather than languishing in prison cells.

Time is marked differently in prison than in the political world. 
There's no adjournment, as there is for the Legislature, and there 
are no campaigns for re-election every two years. The word came down 
from the governor's office last week that Mr. Pataki had been 
resisting Mr. Silver's soft-on-crime policies for 11 years and 128 
days. Yes, they're counting. By today, it will be 11 years and 138 days.

Only that's not such a long stretch, not by the standards of someone 
doing time under drug laws that should have been off the books before 
either Mr. Pataki or Mr. Silver ever came to power.

At the Capitol, the legislative calendar is now down to just a few 
weeks. But it's hardly premature to say that failure of the Senate to 
consider drug law reform, and the governor to embrace it, will count 
as another wasted year in Albany.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman