MR. CUOMO'S INITIATIVE

He Sets The Right Example On Reforming The Rockefeller Drug Laws; Others
Should Follow

Andrew Cuomo's proposal to exempt non-violent and low-level offenders from
the cruel trap of the Rockefeller drug laws is just bold enough to invite
these questions: Why not repeal such mandatory minimum sentencing entirely?
Why not take an entirely new approach to drug crimes?

And these questions as well: Why do the laws persist, after 30 years? Why
have even the most modest of reforms been prevented from passing?

All need to be asked, and in the context of the election in which Mr. Cuomo
is challenging both Governor Pataki and fellow Democrat H. Carl McCall.

Mr. Cuomo deserves credit for a plan that most likely would have kept a
sizable majority of the state's 19,000 drug criminals from being sentenced
to mandatory prison terms of 15 years or more. He would shift the focus to
where it should be, the role of an individual offender in a specific drug
crime, rather than the amount of drugs he or she was convicted of
possessing or selling. Discretion over the terms and nature of punishment
would return to the judges, rather than remain with the prosecutors. That
would end the injustice of low-level addicts, for whom treatment is often
the best remedy, frequently facing longer sentences than big-time drug dealers.

What needs to be addressed now is on what basis drug offenders would be
classified as non-violent and thus be eligible for the more reasonable and
humane sentencing that Mr. Cuomo advocates. About a quarter of drug
criminals do have prior convictions for violent crimes. A much smaller
percentage of them, however, were found to be guilty of such offenses in
the commission of the drug crimes that landed them in prison for at least
15 years and often quite longer.

The sentencing commission that Mr. Cuomo envisions would have to draw that
distinction, apparently, as well as set clearer guidelines on when drug
treatment is more appropriate than incarceration. His proposal, in other
words, doesn't by itself resolve the collective failures of horribly
ill-conceived laws.

What it does, however, is look beyond the charade behind the Rockefeller
drug laws. This is the policy that all the powerful interests, except the
state's district attorneys, say they want to change, in a very substantial
way. Yet still the laws endure.

Mr. Pataki's latest proposal is to eliminate life sentences for drug
crimes, but to end parole as well. Mandatory minimum sentences, the core of
this scandal by legislation, would remain. The argument has been made
already that prison sentences for drug law violators could get longer as a
result.

In the state Legislature, it's again the more limited approaches that tend
to be favored. Even the elusive compromise, between the governor's plan and
the Assembly's plan, wouldn't go as far as Mr. Cuomo's. But then Mr. Cuomo
is not the governor, and might never be. His plan is welcome nonetheless,
for it might yet nudge those who can repeal the Rockefeller drugs laws into
action. By now, it's fair to say, failure to change them is tantamount to
tolerating the intolerable.