INMATE SEEKS FREEDOM UNDER NEW DRUG LAWS

After 19 years and 24 days behind bars, a 69-year-old cocaine dealer named
Ivan Wright, sentenced under New York's Rockefeller drug laws, expects to
hear from a judge in Brooklyn today that his prison time is done.

Mr. Wright is believed to be the state's first inmate to face release after
the State Legislature's overhaul of the laws last month reduced mandatory
sentences that had drawn protests for years and made New York drug laws
synonymous with harsh penalties.

The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, is supporting Mr.
Wright's application for freedom before Justice Lewis L. Douglass of State
Supreme Court.

In 1987, Justice Douglass sentenced Mr. Wright to 25 years to life after he
was convicted of selling three ounces of cocaine to an undercover officer
in Crown Heights. Mr. Wright had been in prison since his arrest two years
earlier.

Under the new laws, which keep the original judges on cases if they are
still sitting, Mr. Wright's conviction, which was his second, would draw 12
to 24 years, said Anne J. Swern, the counsel to Mr. Hynes. "When you're
looking at the range of permissible sentences under the new law," Ms. Swern
said, "we believe that justice is served by him serving 19 years."

Mr. Wright will not walk free today; it will take days or weeks for his
paperwork to be processed. And, his lawyers said, he entered the country
illegally from Panama in 1974, and officials filed deportation orders
against him while he was in prison.

But spending his old age in Panama would be a big improvement over spending
the next six years in prison, said Angela G. Garcia, one of the lawyers who
handled his application to be resentenced to time served. "Of course he'd
prefer to go back," she said. "Anybody would."

Unlike some Rockefeller prisoners serving long terms for simple possession
or for selling small amounts of drugs, Mr. Wright was described in his
probation report as an "upper-middle-level manager" in a drug ring based in
Crown Heights.

He was arrested after selling cocaine five times to an undercover officer,
the last time delivering three ounces, worth more than $4,500, prosecutors
said. And he had a prior conviction for drug possession and attempted assault.

But Ms. Swern said there were many factors in Mr. Wright's favor, including
his age; glowing reviews from supervisors at his kitchen job at the
Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, where he has been since 1989;
and his relatively good record in prison, where he was cited once for
refusing to clean his cell and twice for minor violent conduct.

"He was a good inmate and we believe he no longer poses a threat to
society," said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for Mr. Hynes.

When he was arrested in 1985, Mr. Wright was a 50-year-old craftsman for a
construction company. Now, Ms. Garcia said, he is an old man. "His health
is not too good," she said.

Mr. Wright's case comes before the judge a week after the new laws took
effect, on Jan. 13. His application was filed that same day, and Ms. Swern
said that Mr. Hynes, whose 15-year-old program to divert prison-bound drug
offenders to residential treatment has been widely imitated statewide,
quickly informed Mr. Wright's lawyers of his support.

There are 446 offenders in the state who, like Mr. Wright, are serving at
least 15 years to life in prison under the Rockefeller drug laws.

Tomorrow, in Syracuse, another inmate, who has served 14 years of a
20-year-to-life sentence for cocaine possession, will get a hearing in
Onondaga County Court, according to The Post-Standard of Syracuse. But
several prisoner advocacy groups that lobbied to change the laws said
yesterday that they believed Mr. Wright's application for resentencing
would be the first to be heard.

Robert Gangi, of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison
watchdog group, said that under a just system, Mr. Wright would have been
freed long ago.

"It would have been objectionable if Hynes had protested," Mr. Gangi said.
"Someone getting 19 years for selling three ounces of a drug? People don't
get 19 years for rape, assault or homicide. It's an extraordinarily harsh
sentence.' '