SANER SENTENCING

New York state legislators adopted a bill Tuesday that gives hope for early
release to some of the thousands of men and women currently serving stiff
mandatory minimum sentences under the state's notorious Rockefeller drug laws.

The late Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, faced with a heroin crisis,
pushed through those laws, which were the toughest ever on first-time
offenders. Now, another popular Republican, Gov. George Pataki, is poised
to sign the bill to moderate them.

For example, rather than a minimum 15 years to life, certain first-time
offenders would serve eight years at most. The quantity of drugs required
to trigger felony possession would increase, and prisoners serving the
longest Rockefeller sentences would be able to seek reductions.

Not all members of the coalition that battled for reform consider the bill
a great victory. But it nevertheless represents a significant breakthrough
in the decades-long effort to restore reason to justice, especially because
of New York's status as a role model for other states' drug sentencing
policies.

Because so many states cloned the Rockefeller laws, America's prison
population has soared. Kentucky's, for example, has risen 600 percent since
1970, in part because of harsh sentences for non-violent drug offenders.
That increase prompted the author of Kentucky's penal code, University of
Kentucky law professor Robert Lawson, to call recently for an overhaul.

Legislators, he said, have lost sight of the need to distinguish between
dangerous and non-dangerous offenders. Lt. Gov. Steve Pence, who also
serves as the state's Justice secretary, agrees. "We need to sentence drug
offenders the smart way," he has said.

So if New York was a role model for excessive sentencing, let it now become
a role model for the smarter way.

Gov. Pataki and all the Republicans and Democrats who worked for the bill
that passed this week have struck a blow for sanity in drug sentencing
that's been way too long in coming.