MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A suspended Columbia University student has admitted to selling cocaine to an undercover officer and will be sentenced to six months in jail, according to a plea deal struck Tuesday.
Harrison David, 20, said he sold powdered cocaine to an undercover police officer on Aug. 21, 2010 at the West 113th Street apartment where he lived prior to entering his sophomore year last fall. He pleaded guilty Tuesday to criminal sale of a controlled substance, a felony.
He will likely spend only 3 1/2 months of his sentence at Rikers Island as a result of time served and good behavior, his attorney, Matthew Myers, said.
David, of Massachusetts, will also carry a permanent felony record which will make it more challenging to reapply to colleges and find employment in the future, Myers said.
He will likely be formally expelled from the university in the near future.
"He has huge regrets about it because now he's blown an Ivy League education," Myers said, adding, "His family is extremely upset."
The admitted drug dealer had previously turned down an offer to 1 year in prison and 2 years of probation.
Instead, David ended up with up to six months in jail and five years probation, prosecutors said.
"We believe that less incarceration time and the additional three years of monitoring will serve in the interest of justice," said Assistant District Attorney William Novak, of the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor.
David was one of five students, many of whom belonged to fraternities at the school, who were arrested in Morningside Heights on Dec. 7 and charged with selling $11,000 worth of cocaine, MDMA, LSD, marijuana and other drugs to undercover police officers.
As the only one charged with dealing cocaine, David faced mandatory prison time if convicted of the top indictment charge. He pleaded guilty to a lower level drug sale offense.
The arrests followed a five-month investigation coined "Operation Ivy League" in which the students were found to be dealing drugs out of fraternity houses and apartments at Columbia.
The case was marred by the arrest of one of the main undercover detectives who set up the sting. Richard Palase was arrested as part of a Staten Island illegal gambling operation in June.
Myers said the the detective was involved in two of the undercover sales by David and that the detective's legal troubles may have given his client a small amount of leverage in his plea negotiation.
David, who has been suspended from the university since his arrest, did not comment to reporters when leaving the courthouse on Tuesday. He is set to turn himself in at his sentencing on Aug. 30.
No deals have been reached in the cases of Christopher Coles, Adam Klein, Jose Stephan Perez and Michael Wymbs, the other students charged. They are all suspended from Columbia.
On Tuesday, the other defendants' lawyers filed briefs in support of getting them drug treatment instead of jail as a punishment. They are due back in court on Sept. 23.
