Velella Release Sends Insulting Message

Of all the people outraged by the preferential treatment and early prison release given Guy Velella, there is a special hurt in the voice of a South Bronx defense lawyer, Ramon Jiminez.A graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Jiminez has spent 29 years practicing in that relentless meat grinder called Bronx Criminal Court. He has been a witness to long days of what passes for justice, as it is applied to teenagers without high-priced lawyers and without powerful friends. Friends who can pull strings and write letters to an early-release city agency no one ever heard of.“I have seen so many teenage blacks and Latinos get sentenced to a year in Rikers Island for a nonviolent first offense, for shoplifting, for stealing a TV, for personal-use drug possession,” Mr. Jiminez told me. “Some of them deserved drug rehab or counseling, but they didn’t have the connections. This is what kills me about Senator Velella being a lawmaker, taking $137,000 in bribes, and getting out in three months after being sentenced to a year.“This sends a message of unequal justice to everyone in the Bronx,” Mr. Jiminez continued. “It tells kids there is one legal system for the poor and another for the powerful. And it tells corrupt politicians that even if they get caught and convicted, they won’t have to serve their time.”Velella’s premature release is one of the city’s most accessible scandals in a long time. The editorial pages of the New York Post and Daily News are on the warpath. This is the kind of unfair fix that everyone understands.The only practical remedy is for the city’s obscure Conditional Release Commission to convene in public and send Velella back to jail to complete his sentence. That is exactly what the commission did when it released the ex-Jets player Mark Gastineau. The precedent exists to rectify this backroom favoritism, which nullified District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s painstaking two-year investigation and Judge Joan Sudolnik’s sentence.Thirty-two public figures wrote letters in support of Velella, including Herman Badillo, Rep. Eliot Engle, Mayor Koch, three retired judges, and two Bronx legislators.After the public backlash against this early release, Messrs. Koch and Engle said they had no idea their letters would be used to obtain the early release. Other letter-writers now say they were just trying to bolster Velella’s spirits in jail and didn’t realize their letters would be part of a formal submission to the board.If this is true, then the letter-writers were duped, and this deception could be the basis for requiring Velella, once a powerful Bronx state senator, to complete his sentence.Raul Russi, chairman of the early release commission, also runs a Bronx addiction-services agency that received $1.9 million in state funds in the current fiscal year. Albany politicians say nothing in the Bronx got state funds without Velella’s approval.About 7,000 prisoners were eligible for such early release this year, but only five inmates received the rare favor. And three of these five were Velella and men convicted with him, Hector del Toro and Manuel Gonzales.Only 15 criminals have been given early release by this agency in the past five years, out of 35,000 eligible prisoners.I would think that a politician and party boss, who took $137,000 in bribes, would be the last inmate to qualify for such preferential treatment, given the damage he inflicted upon the public trust and the taxpayers.Velella, with two decades of seniority, was a key player in Albany’s dysfunctional system of late budgets, gerrymandering (especially his own district), pork-barrel spending and favor trading, and lack of internal democracy in both houses of the Legislature. Everything that is wrong with Albany, Velella practiced, with zeal and self-indulgence.The last straw for many was the disclosure last week, that, upon his undeserved release, Velella was driven directly to a Bronx restaurant by the president of the correction officers union, Norman Seabrook.I know life is unfair, as President Kennedy famously remarked. But this particular unfairness is too flagrant.Bronx teenagers get sentenced to the violent hellhole of Rikers Island instead of getting drug treatment, while a crooked politician with fixer friends gets a personal escort out of Rikers nine months early.Guy Velella has to be sent back to do his time, as a message that equal justice still lives in this city.

Velella Release Sends Insulting Message

Velella Release Sends Insulting Message

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