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Ivy League case tests drug-law change
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Photo
Columbia University student Michael Wymbs, left, is escorted from the New York Police Department's 25th Precinct in Manhattan after he and four other students were arrested on Tuesday Dec. 7, 2010, in New York. Authorities say the five Columbia University students sold LSD-spiked candy and a full menu of other drugs at three fraternity houses and other residences on the Ivy League campus, where it was believed at least one of the suspects was using the drug money for school expenses.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Photo
In this Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2010 photo released by the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for the City of New York, candy wrapped in foil is seen in the plastic bag at right and individual bags of capsules believed to be MDNA are seen at left, on a table in the Columbia University student housing, in New York. Five Columbia University students were charged Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2010, with selling LSD-spiked candy and other drugs at three fraternity houses and other residences on the Ivy League campus, with two allegedly claiming they needed the drug money to cover tuition.
Associated Press
NEW YORK
They were students who juggled an elite education with criminal extracurriculars, dealing an array of drugs from Ivy League dorm rooms and frat houses, prosecutors say.
But beneath the surface of academic success, some of the Columbia University students charged in a campus drug takedown struggled with substance abuse, their lawyers say. Attorneys for two of the five students plan to ask a court to prescribe treatment instead of prison — one of the most high-profile tests so far of a recent overhaul of New York’s once-notoriously stringent drug laws.
The outcome will be watched closely by opponents and proponents of 2009 changes to mitigate what were known as the Rockefeller drug laws. Backers called the lesser punishments a more effective and humane approach to drug crime; critics said they gave drug peddlers a pass.
With the bid for what’s known as “diversion” to treatment, the Columbia bust “is probably the case that’s going to cause light to be shed on what these new laws mean: When diversion is appropriate, and what the Legislature intended when it cut back so drastically the Rockefeller laws,” said Marc Agnifilo, who represents one of the students, Christopher Coles.
Coles and fellow students Harrison David, Adam Klein, Jose Perez and Michael Wymbs were arrested in December, have pleaded not guilty and are due back in court in March. Authorities called the arrests one of the largest drug take-downs at a New York City college in recent memory, and the prestigious setting made the case a media magnet.
Each student made some of the 31 sales in which an undercover officer bought about $11,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine, LSD, Ecstasy and prescription stimulants over five months, authorities said. Drugs, paraphernalia and more than $6,600 in cash were found in the students’ rooms, according to the office of special narcotics prosecutor Bridget Brennan.
Prosecutors have indicated they’re likely to add to the charges, but at least for now, only David faces mandatory prison time if convicted.
In 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, governor at the time, pushed strict laws through the Legislature that he said were needed to fight a drug-related “reign of terror.” Critics long complained the laws were draconian and racist and filled prisons with people who needed treatment, not incarceration.
The 2009 revisions took away some mandatory minimum terms — after the harshest terms were eliminated in 2004 — and let hundreds of nonviolent drug offenders seek to shorten their sentences. The latest changes also gave judges more latitude to send nonviolent offenders to treatment programs or other alternatives to prison, on the premise that addressing addictions would do more to change some offenders’ criminal behavior than would locking them up.