The Star-Ledger, Newark, NJ 
Copyright 1997: The Star-Ledger

February 21, 1997, page 20

Wanda M. Akin

My co-counsel, Alan Silber, and I are arguing for the defendants, Diana McCague and Thomas Scozzare.  In an effort to stop the spread of AIDS, they were giving out clean needles to drug addicts in New Brunswick one cold night last April when they were arrested.

The state treats operating a needle exchange program as a simple case of the defendants   having broken the New Jersey law that restricts access to sterile needles.

It is not that simple, of course.  While this is not the appropriate forum to argue my client's case, the policy issues involved here have significant implications for many lives.

The law restricting access to clean needles was never intended to apply to public health workers engaged in efforts to slow the spread of a deadly, infectious disease. We argue that other laws relating to public health issues apply.  And under those laws, the operators of clean-needle programs are public health heroes.  My colleague and I are their advocates, and in rendering our services, performed pro bono, we struggle to find the words to show the magnitude of the error the state is making.

The wonderful news of the past few months that some new drugs prolong the lives of AIDS victims has not in any way diminished the importance of slowing the spread of this pandemic terror.

By the end of September 1996, 16,800 New Jersey residents were living with injection-related AIDS or had died from it.  In the face of these frightening AIDS statistics from the New Jersey Health Department, the state is silent on the issue of the severity of the epidemic in New Jersey.  We, less as advocates and more as citizens, think this is world- class denial.

In the face of study after study showing the effectiveness of clean-needle programs, the State claims that their effectiveness is debatable. 

Race plays a role in all this.  Although African Americans are less than 20 percent of the population of New Jersey, they account for almost 60 percent of all new injection-related AIDS cases. This plague is having a devastating impact on African American families.  The vast majority of AIDS cases among black women and their babies are caused by dirty needles.  Over half the clients of the Chai project, the group with which the defendants worked, were minorities.  Thus shutting down the Chai clean-needle program clearly has a disproportionate impact on minority citizens in the New Brunswick area,  violating their fundamental, constitutional right to equal protection. 

The prosecution trivializes this claim and suggests that two white defendants have no standing to try to champion the constitutional rights of minority citizens. I could not disagree more. Legally they do have that right.  And as an African American woman, I heartily applaud the defendants taking the position that vulnerable black lives have value.  In following their consciences, I think Diana and Thomas are the true spiritual descendants of the civil rights workers of  the 1960s.

As a lawyer I am doing my best to defend them.  As a human being, I am very proud to know them.

Wanda M. Akin has her own firm in Newark and represents one of the defendants as  counsel with Podvey, Sachs, Meanor, Catenacci, Hildner & Cocoziello, also of Newark.