PROVIDENCE — Governor Carcieri has once again vetoed bills to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for drug dealers and to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to “pre-register” to vote.

With a flood of bills headed his way from the General Assembly session that ended Saturday night, the veto messages that Carcieri issued yesterday on these two bills raise all the same issues he raised when he vetoed earlier versions of the same bills.

The drug-sentencing bill introduced in the House by Rep. Joseph Almeida, D-Providence, and in the Senate by Sen. Harold Metts, D-Providence, would not only eliminate the current 10-year minimum sentence, it would also lower the maximum allowable prison term — life in prison — for people convicted of manufacturing, selling or possessing “with the intent to manufacture or distribute” illegal drugs from life in prison to 20 years under most circumstances, 30 years in the most serious cases.

The argument: the Reagan-era law has ruined lives, and contributed to the disproportionate number of minorities behind bars.

“Whether intended or not,” Carcieri said, “the practical import of this legislation is that the General Assembly is directing the judiciary to ease up on sentences for serious drug offenses.”

“Presumably the intent … is to give the judiciary discretion to impose a sentence that is commensurate with the underlying crime while giving due weight to any mitigating circumstances,” but Carcieri said judges already have “unfettered authority to deviate from that so-called mandatory minimum … [if] “substantial and compelling circumstances exist which justify imposition of an alternative sentence.”

He said a judge can consider, for example, character, cooperation with the police, the nature and circumstances of the crime, the quality of evidence presented at trial.

Under these circumstances, Carcieri said the legislation could “create an unforeseen but nonetheless perverse incentive for criminals not to cooperate with law enforcement, since cooperation is no longer a specific determinant that a judge may consider in determining the sentence of the guilty.”

Currently, a conviction for possessing more than one ounce of heroin or cocaine, or more than one kilogram of marijuana, carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. For possessing more than one kilogram of heroin or cocaine, or more than five kilograms of marijuana, the mandatory minimum is 20 years.

On the so-called teen pre-registration bills introduced in the House by Rep. Edwin Pacheco, D-Burrillville, and Sen. Rhoda Perry, D-Providence, the governor said state law already allows 17-year-olds to register if they will be 18 by the next election. He said the law has worked well and “creates no impediment, nor dissuades anyone eligible to participate in the political system from doing so.”

“It appears that the legislature has a solution and now much search for a problem,” he said.

Worse, he said the move could be counter-productive if the state, which has invested time and money cleaning up the state’s voter rolls, was now “forced to add thousands of names — all people ineligible to vote.” In a news release hailing the passage again this year of the pre-registration bill, the sponsors anticipated Carcieri’s objections. Pacheco and Perry said they didn’t see “any reason pre registration would be any more susceptible to fraud or confusion than regular registration.” They said it would make it more likely that students “who might be away at college when they turn 18” would return to vote.

kgregg@projo.com