HE LOOKED more like a corporate middle manager who’d fallen on hard times than a mid-level drug peddler who’d spent nearly two decades in prison.
Ivan Wright, his balding head gray, shuffled into the Brooklyn courtroom in spectacles and handcuffs. His daughter wept. The mother of his youngest son prayed. The people of Brooklyn held their collective breath.
After spending the first half of his life delivering poison to the streets and his second act behind bars, Wright, 69, finally seized the opportunity to accomplish something notable with his day.
Yesterday he became the first repeat drug felon to be set free, after having his Rockefeller-era prison sentence cut short.
Brooklyn Justice Lewis Douglass – the same man who sentenced Wright to 25 to life back when both men were far less gray – yesterday slashed his sentence to the 19 years served.
“We have done what the Legislature asked,” the judge said.
But aside from a joyful family reunion – “I want to hug him!” said daughter Dolka Fareaux, 30 – Wright’s impending release brought little celebration.
Because despite propaganda that claims the Rocky-era laws turned hordes of dumb, first-time drug users into career inmates, the reality is that the typical recipients of the long sentences were men at least as destructive as Ivan Wright.
In 1985, Wright, a convicted dealer, was caught four times selling cocaine in amounts worth $60 to $4,800. Officials labeled him a “middle-level manager” of the drug trade.
Activists are fond of calling the Rocky laws “racist.” But it seems Wright was hit hard not because he is black, but because he had the misfortune of not taking drugs himself. Addicts, you see, have an easier time than ordinary dealers at scoring a sentence in drug rehab.
Fortunately, Wright is no longer our problem.
He is likely to be deported to his native Panama. His lawyers say he will leave voluntarily.
Perhaps the system works, after all.