Nicole duFresne was the 28-year-old actress who was shot to death last week while attempting to thwart a robbery on the Lower East Side. It seems obscene to speak of her murder as anything other than a catastrophe. But fate plays cruel tricks. If duFresne’s murder can remind us of some of the pitfalls of New York’s policy land scape support for change, perhaps her death won’t have been entirely in vain.

The man arrested for her murder, Rudy Fleming, 19, may be innocent until proven guilty, but if the charges against him are sustained it will certainly put Judge Leonard Rienzi of the Staten Island state Supreme Court on the spot. It was he who, for an earlier offense, decided to sentence Fleming to three years’ incarceration instead of the maximum seven. That error of judgment may well have played a role in duFresne’s death. These decisions aren’t easy ones, for sure. One might just as well have argued at the time that a seven-year sentence to a young offender like Fleming would have had him emerge from prison as a hardened criminal. But at least during those seven years he would have been off the streets.

Fleming, since his release, had frequented the Bernard Baruch Houses, a housing project. Most inhabitants of public housing are law-abiding, and there are criminals who live in Fifth Avenue co-ops, too. But we’ve long since concluded that housing projects, like welfare, are among the great tragedies of 20th-century liberalism, endeavors that ended up hurting those people they were supposed to help. Instead of providing dignified living for the poor, the projects all too often became breeding grounds for crime and other social pathologies. Other cities, like Chicago, St. Louis, and Newark, have demolished public housing projects. But New York maintains the largest public housing system in the country; the average family in city housing stays for 17.7 years.

In last year’s State of the Union address, President Bush proposed a four-year, $300 million “prisoner re-entry initiative to expand job training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups.” Said Mr. Bush, “America is the land of second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.” Fleming, who got out of prison in June of 2004 and is accused of having committed murder seven months later, was being visited by a parole officer, but whatever services he was receiving do not appear to have been enough to put him on the right path. Will Nicole duFresne’s murder be enough to push New Yorkers to ask what can be done to prevent something like it from happening again – and then to act?