ASSEMBLY HAS IT RIGHT: LET JUDGES DO THE JUDGING

Competing proposals to reform the state's drug laws differ dramatically on
the core issue of how much discretion judges should have in sentencing drug
offenders to treatment instead of prison. Wider discretion, such as in the
proposal in the Assembly, is better.

The plans, one from Assembly Democrats, the other from Gov. George Pataki,
both would reduce the current mandatory 15-year-to-life sentence for
possession of four or more ounces of a controlled substance. And both would
allow judges to make decisions about treatment vs. prison in more of the
less-serious drug cases than current law allows.

The Assembly plan, however, would allow judges to make those decisions
independently, after hearing arguments from both prosecutors and defense
lawyers. The governor's plan, in many instances, would give prosecutors
veto power over a judge's sentence of treatment. The difference growing out
of that distinction would be huge, according to the nonprofit Legal Action
Center in New York City, which has endorsed broad reform.

Center researchers looked at how many of the offenders who went to prison
last year under the state's mandatory sentencing laws would have been
eligible for judicial diversion to treatment under each reform proposal.

Under the Assembly plan, judges would have been allowed the unfettered
power to consider treatment for 4,872 of those individuals. Under Pataki's
proposal, only 343 would have been eligible. Pataki deserves credit for
jump-starting the discussion of reform when he introduced his proposal in
January. But it doesn't go far enough. It would perpetuate the distortion
of the justice system created by current law, by which prosecutors, rather
than judges, have ultimate power over sentencing.

The state's mandatory drug-sentencing laws should be scrapped, and the
power to decide what constitutes justice should be returned to judges. That
is, after all, what they're elected or appointed to do.