Members of Providence Youth Student Movement, left, Lizzy Chin, Davide Gnoato, and Coony Hear, attend a House Finance Committee hearing on the repeal of a law that lets 17-year-olds be tried as adults in criminal matters.

The Providence Journal Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — In a one-day special session yesterday state lawmakers voted to move the state’s presidential primary up by a month and reverse their earlier — and much-criticized — decision to send 17-year-olds to the state prison instead of the Training School.

The General Assembly also overrode close to three dozen of Republican Governor Carcieri’s vetoes.

On a night in which there were few surprises, legislative leaders at the last minute agreed to take up a version of the presidential primary bill that cleared the Senate, and then stalled in the House during the regular legislative session that ended in June.

Aimed at making Rhode Island more relevant on the national political scene, the legislation now headed to the governor would move the state’s presidential primary from March 4 to Feb. 5, 2008, a date so popular it has become known as Super Duper Tuesday.

“If you wait until March, it’s over,” said the sponsor, Sen. Leonidas P. Raptakis, D-Coventry, noting that 36 states are planning to hold their 2008 primaries before Rhode Island’s March 4 vote.

But House Minority Leader Robert Watson said the only candidate who benefits from the move is Democrat Hillary Clinton, who is “desperate to end the primary cycle as soon as possible.” Watson and nine other members of the small House GOP delegation signed a letter asking the governor to veto the bill after it cleared its last legislative hurdle on a 38-to-25 House vote last night.

While the primary vote was unexpected, other votes — and the debates surrounding them — went as expected in the Democrat-dominated legislature.

Nurses cheered from the gallery — and partisan words flew — before the Assembly overwhelmingly voted to override the governor’s veto of a bill banning forced overtime for hospital nurses. The legislation prohibits requiring nurses to work more than 12 consecutive hours.

In his veto message and again in an interview yesterday, Carcieri labeled the bill an end-run by organized labor around collective bargaining. “I love nurses. I’ve got nothing against nurses,” but “this is nonsense,” the governor said.

“If it’s a security-safety issue then they should pass legislation that no nurse should work beyond so many hours…I would support that. They do it with airline pilots. They do it with truck drivers… . This is just the union doing an end-run. They can’t get it in collective bargaining so they come up here… . We don’t need union issues being dealt with by the legislature.”

Sounding the same themes, Rep. Nicholas Gorham, R-Coventry, brandished an Oct. 23 letter from AFL-CIO leaders to lawmakers signaling which vetoes they wanted overridden. “Unlike so many people in this chamber, I have tough elections,” Gorham said, “and one of the things that I hear over and over and over again on people’s doorsteps is they think that these guys are running the state, the people who sent us a letter on Oct. 23 … .”

House Speaker William J. Murphy cut him short, saying: “Representative Gorham, that has nothing to do with the veto message.” Gorham’s reply: “It has everything to do with it… There’s a perception out there that there are union leaders who are more important in this chamber than our constituents.”

While the fate of most of the issues taken up yesterday was not in question, House leaders had been reluctant to commit to reversing the law passed just four months ago that required the treatment of 17-year-olds as adults in all criminal cases.

Critics, ranging from the Family Court to the attorney general’s office to the state American Civil Liberties Union, emerged almost immediately after the bill was passed in June, arguing that the law was not cost-effective and was bad public policy.

Heeding the critics, the House voted to repeal the measure and to seal the police records immediately of 17-year-olds arrested since the law took effect July 1. After they complete their sentences or are found innocent, their court filings would be sealed. The Senate also approved the change.

But lawmakers did not make the bill retroactive, meaning that all those 17-year-olds charged from July 1 through yesterday will continue in the adult courts, facing harsher penalties.

They include 49 17-year-olds jailed at the Adult Correctional Institutions since July 1, according to Corrections Department Director A.T. Wall. And there have been countless others arrested and charged in adult court, but not jailed, in that time. Steven Brown, of the ACLU, estimates there have been “hundreds.”

During yesterday’s House Finance Committee hearing on the legislation, those teens were dubbed “gap kids.”

From the beginning of the debate, it was clear that the committee would vote for repeal of the measure. Members had largely conceded that the justification for the law — that it would save roughly $3.6 million because it’s cheaper to house inmates at the Adult Correctional Institutions than the Training School — was wrong.

Wall said that 17-year-old inmates would be held at the high-security unit, known as “super max,” for their protection, at an average cost of more than $100,000 a year. He told a Senate panel investigating the issue last month that the governor’s office did not consult him before the proposal was introduced.

The only question left for yesterday was whether it would be retroactive. Witnesses yesterday suggested the state may open itself up to a lawsuit by refusing to make the reversal retroactive.

“If I were in private practice … I don’t think I would hesitate to go to the courthouse,” Family Court Judge Howard I. Lipsey told House Finance.

Deputy Attorney General Gerald Coyne, however, testified that making the repeal retroactive “is likely to cause chaos” in the courts and in the lives of the victims’ families. Coyne said there were some high-profile cases that would be affected, but did not mention the case of 17-year-old Ryan Greenberg, the Barrington teen arrested July 17 in the boating death of Barrington High School classmate Patrick Murphy.

Greenberg has pleaded not guilty to reckless boating, death resulting; refusing to take a breath test; and underage possession of alcohol. A retroactive repeal would have allowed Murphy to move his case to Family Court, where his jail time would be capped at the Training School, unless the court allowed him to be tried as an adult.

Yesterday’s vote allows Greenberg’s case and countless others to proceed in Superior Court where the attorney general can seek much harsher penalties.

Dennys George, 17, was standing in the corner of the House Finance Committee hearing room trying to comprehend what had happened immediately after the vote. He pleaded no contest to felony charges related to a July arrest for possessing and intending to distribute crack cocaine.

“I’m disappointed,” he said. “[My criminal record] is not going to come out. … I’m going to have a life. I’m going to be able to have a job. But I’m going to have to do my time. Oh my God.”

It’s unclear how the state will pay for the costs associated with reversing the bill. Department of Children, Youth and Families Director Patricia Martinez said it would cost about $2.7 million.

Less controversial were the confirmation hearings, and subsequent Senate votes, for: a new state fire marshal, Lime Rock Fire District Chief Frank Sylvester; a new chief magistrate of the state’s Traffic Tribunal, William R. Guglietta, the chief counsel to the House majority leader; and the reappointment of drug court magistrate Gordon M. Smith.

Supporters all used the same words to describe the three men. They were fair. They had integrity. They were thoughtful, hardworking, and dedicated to serving Rhode Islanders.

Sylvester was one of the architects of the new fire codes adopted after the fatal Station nightclub fire, and a past lobbyist of fire regulations. He spent more than 20 years in the Pawtucket Fire Department, then another 19 as chief of Lincoln’s Lime Rock Fire District, where he took a sleepy volunteer fire department and turned it into a professional, full-time, well-trained agency.

A former state prosecutor and candidate for attorney general, Guglietta was also a community prosecutor for the Mount Hope neighborhood in Providence.

Two critics spoke, but they made clear they were critical of the process in which the magistrates were appointed, not the candidates themselves.

Voters approved a judicial merit-selection process in 1994, but the new chief magistrate’s position skirts around that law, said Providence lawyer Keven A. McKenna. The new chief magistrate also will have the power of also appointing magistrates.

This was not the process that voters wanted, McKenna said. “They’re wonderful people, but don’t approve their appointments,” he said.

Both chambers of the Assembly had concluded their business last night by 10:45. The part-time Assembly won’t reconvene until January.

Journal staff writer Amanda Milkovits also contributed to this story.

amilkovi@projo.com