Judge hears drug-court arguments
The debate over privacy laws versus an open court system landed before an Orange County judge Tuesday when lawyers representing Noelle Bush and the Orlando Sentinel argued whether drug-court hearings should remain public.
10/9/02
Keep drug court open
Sentinel's position: Drug court is a criminal proceeding and shouldn't be kept secret.
10/9/02
Close drug court hearing, or keep it open?
- ORLANDO - Closing a drug court hearing for Noelle Bush, the governor's daughter, would set a precedent that would change the nature of the court and compel the judge to close hearings for all defendants, not just members of prominent families, an attorney for two newspapers argued Tuesday.
10/9/02
Rehab staffers can reject queries on Noelle Bush
A judge says the need to protect a patient's privacy outweighs police interest in how the governor's daughter acquired crack cocaine.
10/1/02
Judge: In rehab, privacy laws apply
In a case that has captured the attention of legal scholars across the nation, a judge ruled Monday that Noelle Bush's drug therapists won't have to testify in court about the crack cocaine found in her shoe.
10/1/02
An American gulag in the making
'We have created an American gulag," declared former drug czar Barry McCaffrey in 1996, describing the widespread and accelerating incarceration of drug offenders.
9/28/02
Behind czarist 'truths': Deception
is no way to wage the drug war
The dogmatic heartlessness of the war on drugs was on flaming display Monday in Flagler and Volusia counties as national drug "czar" John Walters brought a message high on zero tolerance and dubious facts to a high school and a drug treatment center. Walters' sophomoric claims and punishing solutions illustrate exactly why a record 74 percent of Americans believe the war on drugs is a failure and why claims like Walters' cannot be trusted: They are irresponsibly blind to reality. 9/26/02
Letters to the Editor: Regier - Rehab clinic obeying law in Noelle Bush case
I must respond to Jac Wilder VerSteeg's Sept. 17 column, "Gov. Bush and drug rehab clinics," in which he criticizes state-supported drug treatment programs, like the one in which the governor's daughter is enrolled.
9/22/02
A Crack House Divided
- I feel nothing but sympathy and concern for Noelle Bush. Her latest stumble on the rocky road to recovery -- being caught with crack cocaine at a drug rehab center -- shows that she is in desperate need of help.
As a parent, I can also easily empathize with the anguish Noelle's father, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, must be experiencing. And I'm in total agreement with his insistence that his daughter's substance abuse problem is "a private issue."
But when I think about the heartless stance the Governor has taken toward the drug problems of those less-fortunate and well- connected than his daughter, my empathy turns to outrage.
... 9/17/02
Attacking the spirit when a mind needs repair
Citrus County Circuit Judge Ric Howard operates by his own moral compass. Mercy is nowhere on it.
9/10/02
Old
Princeton Hospital could be jail alternative
If community leaders in Orange County succeed in
launching an innovative project to divert mentally ill and drug-addicted
lawbreakers from the overburdened jail and crowded hospital emergency
rooms, they will be among the very few who have. 7/13/02
Lost
drug addicts find treatment
Drug courts provide alternative to prison. 7/7/02
Gov.
Bush's veto of methadone money may send addicts back onto streets - A
decision by Gov. Jeb Bush to veto a $1 million appropriation for three
South Florida methadone clinics could affect more than the patients who
depend on their daily dose of the heroin substitute, critics say.6/14/02
For Noelle Bush, a different
kind of justice
In Florida, drug offenders face hard time -- unless you have money or
connections.
By Michelle Goldberg
Sept. 20, 2002 | It's no secret that rich and poor drug
offenders face vastly different kinds of justice. Just as moneyed
criminals get Johnnie Cochran while the indigent make do with
underpaid public defenders, so are well-heeled substance abusers more
likely to end up in posh rehab clinics than in the prisons where poor
addicts are warehoused. Sure, there are exceptions -- actor Robert
Downey Jr. and baseball star Daryl Strawberry spring to mind -- but
they're not the norm. The norm looks more like Noelle Bush, who,
despite several drug violations, has so far served only three days in
jail.
As most of the country knows by now, the daughter of Florida governor
Jeb Bush and niece of President George W. Bush was found with crack
inside her shoe in the Center for Drug Free Living in Orlando, where
she was sent in January after being arrested for trying to buy Xanax
with a forged prescription. It was not the first time she's been
busted while in rehab -- her three-day jail term in July came after
she was caught with a bag of prescription pills that didn't belong to
her.
Drug-reform advocates certainly don't claim that Noelle Bush has been
treated too leniently -- even three days in jail is too harsh, they
argue. But, they say, the punishment is even more severe for people
without her money or connections. "The question is whether she's
being treated in a unique way," says Bruce Bullington, the editor
of the Journal of Drug Issues and an associate professor of
criminology at Florida State University in Tallahassee. "I think
she is."
Her fellow patients seem to agree. As the Orlando Sentinel reports,
Noelle Bush was reported to the police by a woman who said she was a
Center for Drug Free Living client incensed by what she felt was the
preferential treatment given the governor's daughter.
"One of the women here was caught buying crack cocaine
tonight," the caller said in her Sept. 9 conversation with a 911
dispatcher. "And a lot of the women are upset because she's been
caught about five times. And we want something done because our
children are here, and they just keep letting it slip under the
counter and carpet ... They said, you know, because it's basically
Noelle Bush ... She does this all the time and she gets out of it
because she's the governor's daughter."
According to the New York Daily News, one Center for Drug Free Living
staffer heeded a supervisor's advice and tore up her written statement
about finding the drugs rather than show it to the police. Without the
statement, the police didn't have probable cause to arrest Bush. Four
employees have been subpoenaed after refusing to cooperate with
police, citing the center's privacy policies. Bullington says the
employees would be in the right if they provided the same measure of
protection to all their clients. Whether they do is hard for outsiders
to determine, he says, because individual clinics have a
"tremendous amount of latitude" in creating their policies.
"If this is something they do for all their guests, then it's
perfect," Bullington says. "The vast majority of people who
go into treatment fail very quickly, and fail multiple times."
But the system isn't designed with that in mind, he says. "Anyone
else who they found with a rock of cocaine, they would turn it over to
the police ... And the courts will say there's no second chances, or
one second chance."
Drug-reform advocates are trying hard to create a greater separation
between treatment and the criminal justice system so that the police
don't get involved in the lapses that most recovering addicts
experience. Unfortunately, Bullington says, by allocating more
resources to cops and corrections than to treatment and by filling top
positions with law-and-order conservatives, Noelle's father is working
against the broad application of the kinds of policies that have
protected his daughter. "Again, the issue is not that she should
be punished more but that other people should be given the same kind
of break," he says.
"If a normal person was building up a history like that of Noelle
Bush, she would be looking at jail time now," says Sydney P.
Smith, a defense attorney who spent seven years as a public defender
in Dade County. "It's a discretionary call, but if they actually
found drugs in someone's room, I think many clinics would report it
because it's a crime."
A crime that gets many people locked up. Jim McDonough, director of
the Florida Office of Drug Control, says there are currently 93 people
in state prisons for marijuana possession. According to the Florida
Department of Corrections, 20,000 people in fiscal year 2000 were
convicted of felony drug possession in the state. A third of them went
to jail, and 1,775 served more than a year. Smith mentions one of his
clients, a legal immigrant from Nicaragua, who spent six months in
jail and was then deported for committing crimes almost exactly like
those allegedly committed by Noelle Bush.
Such discrepancies are the reason that Smith, who chairs the Florida
Campaign for New Drug Policies, is leading the campaign to pass an
initiative called the Right to Treatment and Rehabilitation for
Nonviolent Drug Offenses, which will likely go before the Florida
electorate in 2004. Advocates tried to get it on the ballot this year,
but the Florida Supreme Court, which had to approve the measure, took
six months to make a decision, and that left advocates too little time
to collect the necessary signatures.
Modeled on California's Proposition 36, which passed in 2000, the
initiative would amend Florida's constitution to mandate that
nonviolent first- and second-time drug offenders be either sent to
rehabilitation programs or let go. It would also take the likelihood
of relapses into account by giving addicts multiple chances at
treatment. In effect, it would force the state to treat all defendants
the way it's treated Noelle Bush.
But led by Gov. Bush, opposition to the measure is fierce. "I can
assure you that unless we have a change in leadership in the
governor's office and the attorney general's office, prosecutors and
law enforcement will mount a very active campaign against the passage
of this," says Jerry Blair, president of the Florida Prosecuting
Attorneys Association.
When talking about his daughter, the governor is the model of empathy.
"The road to recovery is a difficult and long journey for those
afflicted with addiction," he said on Sept. 10. But he took a
very different tone in August 2001, when arguing against the Right to
Treatment initiative. "To suggest that there should be no
penalties for continued drug use," he said, "is to stick our
head in the sand."
To be fair, it's not just the Bush team that is opposing the measure.
Many in the rehab community are against it as well, arguing that the
threat of jail is necessary to make addicts stick with their program.
While drug-law reformers insist that addiction treatment should be
removed from the criminal realm altogether, Bruce Hayden, the
president of Spectrum Programs, a group of four rehab clinics, says
that the threat of jail is "absolutely" necessary. "For
the most part the criminal justice system and treatment system work
very well together," he says.
But how well they work together has a lot to do with how much money
defendants have. While first-offense possession of crack in Florida
carries a maximum five-year prison sentence (15 years for heroin),
most nonviolent defendants can opt for Florida's system of drug
courts, designed to divert nonviolent addicts into treatment programs
rather than prison. That's what Noelle Bush did. People who complete
the treatment emerge with a clean criminal record.
It sounds like a great system, and in many ways it is. It's certainly
far better than New York's, where mandatory minimum sentences send
people away for decades. Randy Credico, a drug reform activist who
heads the New York-based William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial
Justice, cites the case of a Long Island addict currently serving 12.5
to 25 years for a second-offense crack possession.
But there are two problems with Florida's system. McDonough concedes
that there aren't enough drug courts to handle everyone eligible for
them -- only half who would opt for drug court get in. And those
offenders who want treatment instead of prison often have to find
their own rehab center -- and a way to pay for it.
There are state-subsidized places within the various clinics, but
there's a long waiting list for these, so some defendants go to jail
for lack of treatment options. The problem has been exacerbated by
recent budget cuts, which, according to a January article in the St.
Petersburg Times, eliminated more than 600 subsidized beds -- a third
of the total. (McDonough says he thinks the article exaggerated the
loss of beds.) Those who don't go to treatment don't get their records
cleared, Smith says, so if they're arrested again they can be charged
as habitual offenders, which carries a doubled prison sentence.
"A lot of my clients have to suffer jail because they can't
afford the kind of program that a prosecutor would find
acceptable," says Smith. "If I've got a client with an
unlimited budget, I can find a program for him that is probably going
to satisfy everyone." Furthermore, he says, "programs that
are designed for paying customers tend to be more accommodating,"
as Noelle Bush's has been. Smith says that the referendum would put
the onus on the state, rather than the defendant, to find a treatment
bed for everyone who qualifies for one.
Opponents of the Right to Treatment initiative don't really dispute
the fact that the system favors people with money. Asked whether the
current system discriminates against the poor, Blair says: "In
terms of drug treatment, well, it probably discriminates to the extent
that the state does not furnish adequate drug treatment programs. It
discriminates in the sense that a wealthier defendant might be given
the option to voluntarily enter a drug treatment program at his or her
own expense in order to avoid the consequences of a criminal offense,
and that same drug treatment alternative might not always be available
to indigent defendants."
Hayden agrees. "I would like to think that money should not
determine whether you go to jail or not," he says. "But it
does. Are we talking fair? I think we're talking reality."
