Republican Freshman Wants to Shrink Drug-Free School Zones

An effort to change a school-zone anti-drug law fizzled out last year after prosecutors withdrew their support, but that isn’t stopping a freshman Republican lawmaker from trying again.

Scott Cepicky, newly elected representative for House District 64 in Maury County, has authored a bill to be considered in the new legislative session — a bill he's expected to file tomorrow. The bill would cut in half the size of drug-free school zones in Tennessee’s four most populous counties. (Cepicky filed two bills earlier this month, but withdrew them in order to file this combined version of the legislation.)

Currently, drug crimes committed within 1,000 feet of a school, day care, public library or park in Tennessee come with a mandatory minimum that can put nonviolent first-time offenders behind bars for longer than someone convicted of a violent crime such as rape. In denser cities like Nashville and Memphis, those school zones can effectively blanket the county, leading to enhanced sentences for crimes committed with no children in the vicinity, or even when school is out of session.

“The intent of the law was to keep drugs away from our children and our school systems,” Cepicky says. “When you get down in here to Davidson County, take the example of Hume Fogg. You get 1,000 feet away from Hume Fogg, you're almost down to the arena. If you're selling drugs down by the arena, we already have laws in effect for that. That's not a school zone.”

Under Cepicky’s proposed bill, the zone would shrink to 500 feet in the counties home to Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga. Also in the bill: Distribution of small amounts of marijuana would get a sentence enhancement, an expansion of the law likely to raise the hackles of reformers otherwise willing to support the bill. “The quality of the marijuana, I've been told, is tremendously increased,” says Cepicky.

Nashville Democratic Sen. Brenda Gilmore, who has unsuccessfully pushed drug-free-school-zone reform in the past, says she reached out to Cepicky to offer input to her Republican colleague. In an email to Cepicky, she applauded Cepicky’s provision that would shrink the school zone in more populous counties, and asked him to change the name of the bill and apply the additional penalties for small amounts of marijuana only to sales made specifically to children. In a response, Cepicky thanked Gilmore for her input and asked her to co-sponsor the legislation. (He declined to restrict the additional penalties to sales involving children, but did adopt her idea of naming it the Student Protection and Zone Equity bill.)

“It's not fair to people who live in urban settings as compared to people who live in rural settings,” Gilmore says. “We're spending a tremendous amount of money on prisons that we could be spending on educating our children or infrastructure improvements.”

One of the most famous cases involving a drug-free-school-zone conviction is that of Calvin Bryant, who had no prior criminal record when he was sentenced to 17 years in prison for his first drug offense, which took place inside his home but within 1,000 feet of a school. Last year, Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk agreed to a deal that allowed Bryant to be released. But when Gov. Bill Haslam released his final list of pardons before leaving office, Bryant’s name was not on it, despite pleas from his attorney, the Metro Council and others.

“Shrinking the zones is a laudable and needed reform,” says Bryant’s attorney Daniel Horwitz. “However, history demonstrates that many of the sales that have resulted in school-zone charges were deliberately set up by police near schools. Until the incentive for such ‘luring’ is removed, and until there is some requirement that a defendant actually be aware that he is within a school zone at the time a drug sale takes place, I fear that police will just continue to bring drug sales closer and closer to children, and that very little else will actually change.”