PATAKI OFFERS REVISED PLAN ON DRUG LAWS

ALBANY, July 23 -- Reviving moribund efforts to soften New York's
Rockefeller-era drug laws, Gov. George E. Pataki is making a new offer, one
that would give many more defendants the opportunity to undergo drug
treatment rather than long prison terms.

The new plan goes beyond what Mr. Pataki advocated in a bill he proposed
earlier this year. The Democrats who control the Assembly had said the
governor's earlier proposal did not go far enough, and countered with their
own bill, which the governor dismissed as extreme. But there has been
little substantive discussion between them, and critics of the drug laws
had begun to fear that the issue was dead for the year.

Aides to Mr. Pataki, a Republican, and Democrats who have been leading
advocates of change today described the governor's new plan, which retains
many of the elements from his earlier one, as a good-faith effort to find
middle ground and start serious negotiations. "This shows the governor is
serious about reforming the Rockefeller-era drug laws that I think
everybody universally considers to be draconian," said Randy Daniels, the
governor's secretary of state.

The governor is calling, for the first time, for giving second-time
offenders charged with drug dealing a chance at greatly reduced sentences
through treatment, according to top aides. His earlier proposal dealt only
with people who were charged with possession, not sale.

The governor's new plan includes treatment options for people charged with
a group of serious offenses known as class B felonies, which carry
sentences of as long as 12 1/2 to 25 years, who were largely left out of
his earlier plan. And he would, in comparison to his original plan,
increase the role of judges and reduce the role of prosecutors in deciding
which defendants would qualify for treatment over mandatory sentences.

In all, aides to Mr. Pataki said, the changes would give 2,800 defendants
each year a chance to avoid or cut short mandatory prison sentences. The
treatment option could cost millions of dollars if thousands more are
routed into drug rehabilitation, but no estimate of the cost has been
disclosed yet.

The governor's office has not drafted a bill, making it difficult to assess
the proposal in detail, and the plan has not yet been presented to the
Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, or to the Senate majority leader, Joseph
L. Bruno.

The governor's counsel, James McGuire, gave an hourlong briefing today on
the new offer to Assemblymen Jeffrion L. Aubry and Keith Wright,
influential Democrats who have called for easing the state's system of long
mandatory drug sentences.

"They're trying to find a balance," said Mr. Aubry, of Queens. "They've
made a proposal that's a good starting point for talks."

Mr. Wright, of Manhattan, said, "There's no doubt there's been a lot of
movement on their part." Both men stressed that they wanted to see more
detail, particularly on the costs of treatment.

Even with a renewed focus on the issue, reaching a consensus will not be
easy. Even among the Assembly Democrats, where there is broad support for
drug law reform, there are widely divergent views on the particulars. Many
Democrats will have trouble accepting some elements of the governor's
original plan, like increased penalties for some marijuana offenses.

In the Republican-controlled Senate, Mr. Bruno is reluctant to go even as
far as the governor's initial proposal, so Mr. Pataki's new plan will be a
tough sell.

And then there are the state's district attorneys, who have lobbied against
changing the laws. Tough mandatory sentences give prosecutors a powerful
threat in persuading defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, or to
serve as witnesses against others.

New York's drug laws were enacted in 1973, at the urging of Gov. Nelson A.
Rockefeller, and put into place mandatory prison sentences for nonviolent
drug offenses. In limited cases known as Class A1 felonies, a conviction
for sale or possession of drugs carries a mandatory penalty of 15 years to
life in prison, even if no violence was involved.

Those laws fueled an explosion in the population of the state's prisons,
from 12,000 to about 70,000 in recent years.

In his earlier proposal, Mr. Pataki proposed reducing the minimum sentence
for A1 drug offenses to as low as eight and a third years to life in some
cases, and allowing 500 people serving 15-year-to-life terms to apply for
sentence reductions.

The governor's new proposal would retain that and most other elements of
his earlier plan, including giving judges the discretion to send
second-time offenders convicted of Class C, D or E drug possession felonies
to residential treatment programs rather than prison.

Mr. Pataki's initial plan would require the consent of the prosecutor for
judges to choose treatment over prison in the case of people charged with
more serious Class B possession felonies, or Class C, D or E charges of
selling drugs or possession with intent to sell. People facing Class B
sales charges would not be eligible.

Drug law reform advocates responded to that plan with complaints that
district attorneys would rarely agree to forgo prison, and that by
excluding people charged with Class B felonies, the governor was leaving
out the largest group of felony drug defendants. The result of the
governor's plan, they said, would be to make residential treatment
available to only a small fraction of drug defendants -- a charge the
governor's office disputes.

Mr. Pataki's new plan would keep that first path to treatment and add a new
one for that same group of defendants, covering second-time nonviolent
offenders, both buyers and sellers, up to and including people facing Class
B felony charges.

Those defendants could ask judges to declare them candidates for treatment.
Prosecutors could argue against those findings, but would not be able to
block them unilaterally. Each side could have the decision taken out of the
hands of the trial judge and given to a judge specially trained for such
cases, and each side could appeal a judge's decision.

A defendant who is found eligible for treatment would have to plead guilty
to the felony charged and would be sentenced to prison -- anywhere from 4
to 16 years for a Class B felony under the governor's plan, and shorter
terms for lesser felonies. In prison, the inmate would immediately go into
a treatment program.

If a panel of prison administrators found that the prisoner had completed
the program, the inmate would be released after nine months, and would then
have to complete a six-month residential treatment program.