NEW LAW, NEW LEASE ON LIFE FOR CONVICT

A former Air Force mechanic sentenced in 1994 to up to life in prison
should be home with his elderly mother soon in a Rockefeller-era drug case
that Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said was unworthy of the
public's sympathy.

Norma Arenas, 78, cried amid supporters in State Supreme Court in Kew
Gardens yesterday as Justice Robert McGann resentenced her son, Miguel
Arenas, 41, of the Bronx, to 12 years followed by 5 years' parole.

That should be all but time served, prosecutors said.

Arenas, who has been incarcerated since his arrest in March 1993, was not
released immediately because state corrections officials needed to see if
there's any time left over because of disciplinary infractions while in prison.

The mother and son happily spent a few moments together in the courtroom,
before he was returned to a holding cell.

"We'll be together soon," Norma Arenas said while greeted by members of
Mothers of the New York Disappeared, an advocacy group that helped fight to
have the drug laws changed. "We have a future, and God has helped us get
together. It's been so long since we've been together."

Arenas was among 400 defendants statewide who could be eligible for
resentencing under the Legislature's revised guidelines for punishing
people convicted of serious drug offenses.

A jury convicted him of first-degree criminal sale of a controlled
substance after prosecutors said he helped supply 3.5 ounces of cocaine to
subway maintenance workers in the Transit Authority's Jamaica yard. He was
a subway train repair manager working for an authority subcontractor.

Then-Justice Steven Fisher, now an appellate court judge, sentenced him to
serve 15 years to life. Under the new guidelines, Arenas would have faced 8
to 20 years.

Brown has been quite familiar with Arenas' case. In 2001, in a Newsday
letter to the editor, he wrote that Arenas was a drug trafficker who
"should not be on our streets." In a statement yesterday, Brown said Arenas
had repeated disciplinary infractions while in prison.