CHIEF JUDGE APPOINTS PANEL TO REVIEW HANDLING OF DRUG CASES

In outlining the state court system's priorities at the start of the
new millennium, Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye announced yesterday the
appointment of a commission to examine how to better handle drug cases.

Judge Kaye also said the court system's top priorities are gaining
more flexibility in sentencing addicts and drug dealers and increasing
the compensation rates for court-appointed counsel in criminal cases.
She also spoke of a need to cast the courts and judges in "problem
solving" roles, and simplify New York's trial courts by consolidating
nine courts into two.

First heard in the spring, Judge Kaye's call for appellate court
discretion to reduce the harshest aspects of the so-called Rockefeller
drug laws gained a public endorsement from the Law Enforcement Council
at a breakfast meeting.

Judge Kaye's speech, delivered yesterday at the breakfast meeting of
the Citizens' Crime Commission, was attended by a number of
prosecutors and judges, including Manhattan District Attorney Robert
M. Morgenthau, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, Queens
District Attorney Richard A. Brown and Chief Administrative Judge
Jonathan Lippman.

In announcing the formation of a new commission to examine the court's
response to drug cases, Judge Kaye observed that drugs "at the end of
the 20th century" are "the driving force in our criminal justice system."

About 75 percent of all persons arrested in New York City test
positive for drugs, and over half of all felony indictments involve
drug offenses, she pointed out.

The new commission, headed by a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York, Robert B. Fiske Jr., will have an explicit
mandate to explore ways of adding new Drug Treatment Courts to the
staple of 15 such courts in operation. Sentencing in these courts is
held in abeyance as long as a defendant successfully attends a
treatment program.

Judge Kaye called the "problem-solving" approach used by the Drug
Treatment Courts critical to ending the "revolving-door" syndrome in
which drug addicts "cycle and recycle through our courts."

Similar approaches have been successfully used in dealing with
domestic violence and quality of life crimes, she said.

This new approach has taken judges out of their role as "passive
umpires" and turned them into "active participants in solving
problems," Judge Kaye said. It has also involved the courts with the
other branches of government to "insure that the 'system' as a whole
functions as well as it can."

Manhattan Executive Assistant District Attorney Kristine Hamann, the
Law Enforcement Council's coordinator, announced the group's backing
for Judge Kaye's concept of giving the Appellate Division discretion
to mitigate unduly harsh sentences under the Rockefeller drug laws,
which mandate minimum sentences of 15 years to life for persons
convicted of selling more than two ounces of narcotics or possessing
more than four ounces.

Furthermore, Judge Kaye said raises in the pay rates for
court-appointed lawyers is at the "top of the list of challenges for
the new millennium." She said the current rates $40 an hour for
in-court work and $25 out of court are "ridiculous" and force the
courts into "a churning mode" occasioned by delays as "fewer lawyers
juggle more cases."