DRUG-SENTENCING BATTLE IN ALBANY

With last week's unveiling by Assembly Democratic leaders of their proposal
to reform New York's harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws, the fight for serious
drug-sentencing reform has been joined in Albany. Assembly Speaker Sheldon
Silver and his colleagues did not summon the courage to address reform
until Gov. George Pataki spoke out on the issue. But they have now produced
a stronger and more promising package than the governor's.

There is no good reason that a solid compromise cannot be achieved this
session. Though there are differences between the Pataki and Silver
programs, there is also a broad, bipartisan consensus among lawmakers that
expanding the state's drug treatment programs would be a cheaper and more
effective strategy than continuing to pack the prisons with low-level drug
users.

A key battleground will be the scope of judicial discretion. The governor's
bill would allow judges to decide whether some low-level drug offenders
could be sentenced to court-supervised drug treatment instead of prison.
The Assembly measure would extend that discretion, correctly in our view,
to so- called Class B felons, the category into which most nonviolent
addicts arrested in "buy and bust" operations fit.

There are enemies of reform, among them the state's District Attorneys
Association, which opposes even the governor's more modest proposal. The
prosecutors argue that the stringent sentencing regime was a key factor in
reducing crime, and they consider the threat of long sentences essential
for squeezing plea bargains from defendants. But jurisdictions with less
draconian sentencing regimes have also seen declines in crime, and
prosecutors in those places somehow manage to obtain pleas.

The real issue is control. Many prosecutors support alternatives sentences
but are loath to give judges the power prosecutors now enjoy to decide who
gets treatment and who goes to jail, and how long the sentence will be. Yet
those decisions are more appropriately made by impartial judges vested with
reasonable discretion. The success of the "drug courts" that Chief Judge
Judith Kaye has established with the permission of some local district
attorneys is evidence that the court system is prepared to exercise that
power responsibly.

The lawmakers should resist these arguments. Reform will turn partly on
their ability to do so. It will also turn on Mr. Pataki's willingness to
exercise statesmanship by excising provisions from his package that attempt
to link reform of the Rockefeller drug laws to other policy changes he
knows are unacceptable to Assembly Democrats, such as ending parole for
drug offenses and imposing stiffer penalties for marijuana charges.

There will be plenty of time to debate those issues. Having opened the door
for achieving serious Rockefeller drug law reform, Mr. Pataki's job now is
to keep things simple and make it happen.