DAs Back Some Drug Law Reforms

ALBANY - New York's district attorneys said Friday they would support
limited changes to the state's drug-sentencing laws. In a letter to
Gov. George Pataki and legislative leaders, the prosecutors said there
is consensus among their ranks for softening the harshest category of
the so-called Rockefeller drug laws.

The prosecutors said they also favor extending statewide the
availability of drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration for
nonviolent offenders. Diversion to treatment programs are available in
the most populous counties in the state.

"We have the opportunity to make genuine changes in critical areas
right now," said the president of the prosecutors' group, Steuben
County District Attorney John Tunney. "Do not allow proponents of
radical overhaul of our drug laws to hold these widely supported
reforms hostage."

The support of prosecutors is considered important to any drug law
reforms favored by Pataki and the Republican-controlled state Senate.
The Senate this week ratified Pataki's plan.

The Democrat-dominated state Assembly wants to make more sweeping
changes than the governor and Senate do, and Assembly Democrats say
prosecutors should not be allowed to thwart meaningful reforms by
getting veto power over which inmates are sent into drug treatment.

Prosecutors said Friday they believe Pataki's plan goes further than
it has to. But they praised Pataki's criminal justice service
coordinator Chauncey Parker for soliciting their advice when drafting
the governor's plan.

The district attorneys were derisive about many aspects of the
Assembly plan, saying it would gut all checks and balances in the law
and allow most drug offenders into treatment rather than prison -
whether they should be diverted or not.

The Assembly's approach "seems premised on the notion that, if
diversion of some drug offenders from prosecution to treatment is a
good thing, then diversion of all drug offenders must be even better,"
the district attorneys said.

The district attorneys called the screening procedures for diversion
to treatment advanced by the Assembly "illusory" and predicted they
"would result in diversion of predatory dealers who are not addicts
but manipulators seeking only to avoid punishment."

Pataki spokesman Michael McKeon said the "district attorneys' strong
opposition to the Assembly plan based on their belief that it will
threaten public safety raises real questions as to whether that plan
can pass even in the Assembly itself."

Charles Carrier, a spokesman for state Assembly Democrats, said drug
law reform enjoys bipartisan support in the Legislature.

"The district attorneys' position is overstated and not credible and
the Assembly has advanced a compromise proposal that provides for real
reform," Carrier said. "We should be having discussions to reach an
agreed-upon bill now."

Jonathan Gradess, head of the state Defenders Association, said the
prosecutors are making the "outrageous" suggestion that they must
retain control over decision-making about who goes into drug treatment
because all other parties in the courtroom can't be trusted.

"They are impugning the integrity of the judiciary merely to achieve
continued veto power over plea bargaining," Gradess said of
prosecutors.

The prosecutors also argued that judges already have wide discretion
over sentencing drug offenders in all but the most serious category of
the drug laws - the A-1 offenders, who face mandatory sentences of
between 15 years to life for convictions.

The district attorneys said they favor changing those sentencing laws,
but they noted that Class A-1 drug convictions are "exceedingly rare."
There were only 21 such convictions statewide last year, the
prosecutors said.

"The idea that state prison is full of hapless drug addicts is not
simply a myth, it's a lie," said Albany County District Attorney Paul
Clyne.