FOR A PARALYZED INMATE, RIGID DRUG LAWS ARE THE CRUELER TRAP

TORMVILLE , N.Y. -- His body bent and mostly paralyzed, his breathing
labored and painful, Terrence Stevens personifies the rigidity of New York
State's 27-year-old drug laws. The much debated but never altered statutes
call for sentences that are among the toughest in the nation. For Mr.
Stevens, they are the equivalent of two terms. One is a life sentence, and
the other might as well be. Muscular dystrophy will confine him for life.
And his prison sentence is long enough that he might still be there when the
disease immobilizes him.

Mr. Stevens, 33, was arrested on a bus in Buffalo in 1990 for possessing
five ounces of cocaine. Convicted in 1992, he drew the minimum sentence
allowed under the Rockefeller-era laws -- 15 years to life. That's the same
as the punishment for murder and kidnapping and longer than the minimum
sentences for rape, manslaughter and armed robbery.

His disease was diagnosed while he was growing up in a Manhattan housing
project, and he needed a wheelchair before he was arrested. After more than
seven years at the Green Haven Correctional Facility here, his limbs are
limp and his muscles so atrophied that his body slumps to the left,
squeezing his left lung.

Even the judge who imposed his sentence recoiled at it. "I felt somewhat
helpless to do what I thought should be done, which was to give him a lesser
sentence," John V. Rogowski of Erie County, now retired, said in an
interview.

"What kind of threat to society is he?" asks Jerome W. Marks, a retired
State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan who reviewed Mr. Stevens's case for
his family. "There's no way you can justify sentencing a man in his
condition to 15 years to life." But the law demanded it, even though Mr.
Stevens had no previous drug convictions.

"Do I relish the thought of a guy in a wheelchair going through the rigors
of state prison for 15 years?" asked Lawrence Schwegler, the prosecutor in
the case. "Absolutely not."

For Mr. Stevens, those rigors have become humiliation.

He relies on other prisoners housed in a special unit for his basic needs.
"They've got to put me in and out of bed," he said. "On and off the toilet.
Dress me. Bathe me." It takes the strength of both arms to lift food to his
mouth.

Unable to reach a handicapped-accessible bathroom in time, Mr. Stevens said,
he often soils himself. Three years ago, he said, his wheelchair hit a
pothole in a prison yard and he fell out, injuring himself.

I N 1994, he was locked in a cell 23 hours a day for 40 days for interfering
with a routine strip search, in part by saying he couldn't pull down his
pants, according to a pending lawsuit he filed claiming improper treatment.

A prison official reversed the disciplinary decision, but only after Mr.
Stevens had been punished. A strip-search policy issued later cited Mr.
Stevens as the "one inmate in the facility who is unable, medically, to
spread his buttocks."

Mr. Stevens lives in a cellblock for handicapped inmates, with special
nursing care. "They do the best they can," he said. "Jails weren't built
with people like me in mind."

His first chance for parole is in 2008. "I don't think I'm going to live to
see the end of my sentence," he said.

Seeing the laws rewritten is another question. Various proposals for
altering the drug laws have become like silver balls in Albany's political
pinball machine -- much bouncing around, little forward motion. Meanwhile,
the state spends about $30,000 a year for each of its 72,000 inmates, more
than a third of them imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses.

The man who was arrested along with Mr. Stevens is not one of those inmates.
He received probation after testifying against Mr. Stevens and a state
trooper, who was also convicted. Mr. Stevens's lawyers hope to free him with
a new appeal claiming juror misconduct.

While maintaining his innocence in the drug case, Mr. Stevens confesses,
"I'm no angel." He grew up around drugs in a tough East Harlem housing
project and once served time for a forgery conviction. A 1981 auto accident
put Mr. Stevens in a body cast. Then the disease took over. Home tutors
replaced high school. "I didn't really have any high aspirations because I
knew I was limited by my disease," he said.

Now he aspires to be cared for by his mother, Regina, a school cafeteria
worker. But freeing Mr. Stevens would first require freeing judges.

"It's a sad commentary that the law doesn't permit for the proper relief
that should be given a human being," Judge Rogowski said.