by Randy Credico

“Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights,
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people”

- Isaiah 10:1

Often, during days that never seem to end, Anthony Williams will repair to a corner of his dark, dank, cell in the Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate New York. This is where he ponders, meditates, and prays. And prays and prays, using his faith to rekindle fading dreams that someday, soon, his nightmare will come to a merciful end. Then he rises to write yet another pro se motion, casting it like bread upon the waters of justice, hoping this will be the one that will not be denied by yet another faceless judge.

We of the outside world, even in our wildest imaginations, might never fully comprehend the life of Anthony Williams. Among the many cases chronicled by this office over a dozen years — and we sometimes imagine that have seen it all — none causes more loss of sleep than knowledge of the dreadful plight of Anthony Williams.

Williams is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence for a “mickey mouse” drug offense that occurred in Albany County back in 1991. Anthony has already served more than 17 years of that sentence, dragged in chains from one maximum-security prison to the next. Though he is among the least of small offenders, he is serving the longest of times. He just can’t find his way home from perpetual exile behind thick walls trimmed with razor wire.

Yet, somehow, he remains optimistic and fights on. As does his cancer-stricken mother, Pastor Nazimova, a leader of the Mothers of the New York Disappeared.

From the onset, Williams’ criminal justice journey has been a horror show. Prior to even being charged, he was sequestered for eight hours in a motel room, where his arrest took place. During this ordeal, he was tortured and beaten senseless by rogue elements of the Albany Police Department’s “Special Investigation Unit.” Long before the degrading excesses of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, these police “interrogators” tried to forcibly extract “information” that Williams could not provide. Ultimately, he had to be rushed by ambulance from the motel to the county hospital for emergency care.

Fearful of having their brutal tactics exposed, the police then fabricated their alleged “big case “against Williams. After a painful recovery from extensive and severe wounds, his broken body and tattered soul were transported to the county courthouse, where the African-American youth was quickly convicted by an all-white jury.and then punted to the state’s dangerous prison system by the late, notorious “hanging judge,” Thomas Keegan.

Williams’ woeful tale reads like an Americanized version of a Russian novel - a tome written in four full boxes of records concerning his arrest, interrogation, trial, incarceration and appeals.

Anthony Williams’ best hope for relief came, and went, a few years ago, in 2004 and 2005, when minor “reforms” to New York’s notorious “Rockefeller Drug Laws” provided him with zero relief.

Ironically, he was too small a fish in the ocean of the illicit drug trade to benefit from what have since proven to be anemic legislative charades. Most of the drug offenders who were resentenced and released under those incremental “reforms” had convictions for the possession or the sale of large quantities of illegal narcotics. But treacherous, counterintuitive twists in the “reform legislation” actually made it impossible for many low-level offenders to get retroactive relief. As a result, new provisions of the law did not apply in their particular cases — which is why only a handful of offenders had their sentences reduced.

Worst of all, even when the supposed reforms might have applied, the legislation simultaneously enabled district attorneys to convince judges to interpret the new laws in such a way as to make an individual like Williams ineligible for resentencing. And guess what? That is exactly what Albany County District Attorney David Soares did to the long-suffering Williams. Not just once, but three times! Soares has behaved like a latter-day Inspector Javert of “Les Miserables.” Adding insult to incarceration, Williams’ mother had endorsed Soares in 2004 –based on his campaign pledge to redefine the War on Drugs. She is perplexed today by Soares’ vehement devotion to keeping her only child permanently locked up, as if he were a notorious war criminal. She has a point: her son has served 17 plus years; Albert Speer did 20 at Spandau.

Williams is by no means the only person entrapped in such a bizarre and unjust situation. The conveyor-belt of criminal justice continues to transfer scores of helpless addicts and dime-bag desperadoes - almost exclusively poor people of color — from their communities into the madness of the state prison system.

Enough is enough.

It is beyond overdue for the Legislature and Governor to truly repeal the 36-year failed experiment in racism, injustice and government waste that the Rockefeller Drug Laws have foisted upon the people and taxpayers of New York. It is also time for these lawmakers to reconcile the chaotic discrepancies made in the specious photo-op revisions represented by the 2004-05 legislative “reforms.”

If Albany leaders at last converge to exercise the overwhelming will of their constituencies, and do the right thing, to act like like statesmen rather than salesmen or brokers, then change worth having will surely come, and genuine justice will at long last follow.

Pastor Nazimova and other members of the Mothers of the New York Disappeared have met repeatedly with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. They also have met with Senator Malcolm Smith and Governor Paterson, when he was Senate Minority leader. Nazimova and the Mothers received solemn assurances from each of these “leaders” that they supported the repeal of the barbaric Rockefeller laws. Paterson also assured the heroic Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo that he was dedicated to repeal, during their historic visit to the state capitol and his office in April, 2004. I was present on all of these occasions.

The Williams family is also waiting for crucial, unconditional support from New York’s popular and powerful Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s comeback from his disastrous 2002 challenge to Carl McCall was premised on his pledge to “repeal” those atrocious drug laws. The massive exposure and good will he reaped from this noble cause resurrected Cuomo from a political graveyard into the state’s highest legal office in 2006. However, Cuomo’s early sincerity and support has slowly eroded, as witnessed by his current silence on Rockefeller repeal, among other civil rights issues.

For Anthony Williams’ sake, and for the sake of thousands more Rockefeller “abductees,” the solons of Albany could make history as giants of justice, rather than legislative Liliputians, when they reconvene this January.

In fact, they can make history by repeating history.

New York’s leaders can do so by emulating the historic example of the Massachusetts in 1855, during what was then known as the “Hiss Legislature” (named after statehouse Speaker Joseph Hiss) — a body which U.S. Senator Henry Wilson proclaimed as “the most radical anti-slavery state legislature ever chosen in America.”

In the aftermath of Boston’s gruesome spectacle of a federal rendition trial and the U.S. warship retrieval of fugitive Virginia slave Anthony Burns, and the outlandish Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which enabled the westward expansion of slavery, abolitionist fury and fever inflamed the Bay State. The alarum achieved such frenzy that it catalyzed an astonishing landslide victory for the newly formed anti-slavery party known as the “Massachusetts Know Nothings.”

Massachusetts’ unique brand of “Know Nothing” politics was eclectically composed of what historian Albert Von Frank described as a “colorful group of rank amateurs.” Abolitionists and anti Kansas-Nebraska men took seats next to self-righteous prohibitionists, religious bigots, America-firsters and philanthropists. The overwhelming majority of these leaders were farmers, tradesmen, ministers, writers and lawyers. And none of these political “neophytes” had prior parliamentary experience.

Yet, in spite of, or perhaps because of their political “inexperience”, the “Hiss Legislature” nevertheless got things rolling fast and furiously — particularly in the areas of civil rights and criminal justice. Their considerable accomplishments included the most extensive personal liberty law ever enacted; judicial exclusion of confessions and ex-parte testimony; an act empowering criminal juries to decide both the law and the facts, thereby giving the People the right to check the judicial abuses of power: i.e., jury nullification.

The Hiss legislature also abolished debtors’ prison, outlawed segregation in public schools, passed progressive child labor laws, and enacted a married women’s property rights, among numerous other progressive measures. Their feats prompted the Boston abolitionists’ spiritual leader, the Rev. Theodore Parker, to proclaim at an 1855 July 4th celebration, “We are now making the greatest political experiment which the sun ever looked down upon.”

Today, David Paterson, Sheldon Silver and Malcolm Smith are on the cusp of similar historic potential — if they so choose. They should seize this moment, for the opportunity may never return. It is incumbent upon these incumbents (and new legislators) to follow through on prior pledges including, but not limited to, repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

“Rockefeller” is just the beginning. A complete overhaul of the criminal justice system is desperately needed. A “racial profiling” bill is an essential start. The hack-laden process of judicial appointments must be reformed, as so many judges (disproportionately white and conservative) carry their prior biases as former assistant district attorneys onto their lofty, but hardly impartial, benches of justice. And, as in the case of the Hiss legislature, juries should share the right to decide not just fact, but also law. And, of course, an end to the detestable and unconstitutional and racist practice of “stop and frisk.” There is no place in an open society for the “round up the usual suspects” “ stop and frisk routine.

New York State’s power-drunk district attorneys and New York City’s “special narcotics prosecutor” will inevitably peddle nickel-bags of anecdotal fear mongering to undermine the good will and desire for reform among the majority of New Yorkers. But the legislature must have the courage and will to accept its responsibility to the people, and “Just say No” to this tiny pod of 63 mostly legal dinosaurs.

Incidentally, in 2009, there are district attorney elections in Brooklyn and Manhattan — and the voters in these respective counties can make the incumbents pay with their jobs if they wickedly wield their influence to undermine the repeal movement. The gung-ho special prosecutor’s office should also have to face the voters, rather than being greased into office by the Manhattan District Attorney. Better yet, we would all be better off if this bureaucratic boondoggle of a jobs program for trust-funded Ivy League law graduates were simply abolished, and replaced with something effective and cost efficient: drug treatment centers.

Meanwhile, Anthony Williams should not have to wait any further for full repeal to realize his freedom. Justice is screaming for his immediate release. This can only mean a pardon from Governor Paterson, whose strokes of his powerful pen have come few and far between. To Paterson’s shame, he, of all people should know, mean, and do, much better: As an admitted past cocaine user, he might himself have ended up consigned to a form of “state-subsidized housing” — other than the Governor’s mansion. There, but for the grace of God, might have gone our Governor, himself a man of faith.

Paterson, a bright and well-read individual, also knows of what passes for “law enforcement” in New York’s communities of color. He is quite aware of what goes on in the courtrooms. I have heard this highly-literate Governor cite Tolstoy. Let me remind him of a familiar line from “War and Peace,” which the wise old soldier-sage Platon utters to his fellow prisoner Pierre, during the French occupation of Moscow: “Where there are laws there are lies, where there are courts there are injustices.”

The 1854 ‘Know Nothing” victory in Massachusetts was a watershed for freedom all across America, prompting William Lloyd Garrison’s ecstatic observation that “Nothing like it could be found in the political history of the country.” And it hasn’t happened since, but it could now, here in New York!

This is change that we not only “believe in” but change that is possible. And we of New York could well set the stage for the Obama Era two weeks before the new President takes office:

Governor Paterson could further redeem his own vision of justice by rendering Anthony Williams a free man, so that Anthony and his ailing mother, might together watch the first black American take that solemn oath, entering a more perfect union with a better state of justice.

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