STATE JUST SAYS 'NO' TO DRUG OFFENDERS

BALTIMORE Law-and-order members of the House of Delegates put their
feet down Friday, and rejected a bill that would have allowed parole
for nonviolent drug offenses that now carry mandatory minimum sentences.

Constituents "are not knocking on our door to give more lenient
treatment" to drug dealers, said House Republican leader Anthony
O'Donnell, Calvert. The bill "makes it easier to destroy our
society," he said.

The legislation (H.B. 992) failed 69-68, three votes shy of the
constitutional majority of 71 it needed. It was the second time this
week that the House rejected a proposal from the Judiciary Committee
that was sponsored by Del. Curt Anderson, D-Baltimore City.

The vote was close enough that Anderson said he would try to get the
House to reconsider, perhaps with the help of House Speaker Michael
Busch. Several members of the House leadership voted against the
bill, but Busch said he would not try to round up votes for reconsideration.

"Our citizens are asking us to come up with more creative
responses" to the drug problem, Anderson said, and "make a small
effort to get them into treatment," rather than into prison.

Del. Patrick McDonough, R-Baltimore-Harford, said the bill would just
add more people to the 120,000 Marylanders he said were on parole,
one of the highest ratios in the nation. "We are marching to the edge
of the cliff, and we're marching faster and faster," McDonough said.
"I think our folks back home will be really offended" if the
delegates passed the bill.

Del. Doyle Niemann, a Prince George's County prosecutor, said he
would vote for the legislation because current law "does not make
sense." Many of the people sentenced to mandatory sentences are drug
addicts selling $10 bags of crack cocaine to support their own habit.
"These are not drug lords," Niemann said.

Del. Emmett Burns, a minister from Baltimore County, said he "could
empathize with the intent of this law," but there was no way he
could explain a vote for it to a member of his congregation whose
relative was killed by a drug addict.