Mel Miller, who rose to the highest ranks of New York state government as speaker of the state Assembly and publicly feuded with Governor Mario M. Cuomo, but who was forced from office because of a fraud conviction that was later overturned, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 79.
His wife, Elizabeth Miller, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.
Mr. Miller was found guilty in 1991 of defrauding clients of his private law practice in the 1980s, when he was an Assembly member from Brooklyn but before becoming speaker of the Democratic-controlled body.
An appeals court threw out the conviction in 1993, saying his actions had not constituted felonies. But Mr. Miller, who had been in the Assembly for 21 years and speaker for five, said he would not resume his political career.
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“I don’t think elective office is for me,” he said. “Maybe it’s a little ego. You were king in your own domain; it’s hard to come back into the system as something else.”
He also said his legal expenses in the case, which had not involved any of his actions as a public official, had ruined him financially. He went on to become a successful lobbyist.
As speaker, Mr. Miller had been a member of the triumvirate that controlled state government, along with the governor and the state Senate majority leader.
Mr. Miller, a brash, garrulous, glad-handing liberal, cut his political teeth with a reform-oriented Democratic club in Flatbush. He was known for a confrontational manner in controlling his Democratic herd in the Assembly and in dealing with Cuomo, a fellow liberal Democrat, who was governor from 1983 to 1994.
Almost immediately after becoming speaker in 1987, replacing Stanley Fink, Mr. Miller began publicly feuding with Cuomo over issues like taxes and an ethics code for state officials. Many politicians said that ego and a battle for dominance in Albany fed their feud as much as differences on the issues.
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“I was not going to play follow the leader,” Mr. Miller declared in 1987, explaining why he was pressing for a much larger income tax cut than the governor said was possible. Miller called the governor’s position a bluff, Cuomo reversed his stand and a larger cut was enacted.
Cuomo painted Mr. Miller as weak on ethics and that year won public support for a stronger ethics code than Mr. Miller and the leader of the Republican-controlled state Senate, Warren Anderson, had wanted.
“Sometimes it is necessary to draw the line, to show people what it is that defines you as a person, in this case as a political person,” Cuomo said.
Mr. Miller also fought anticrime measures that Cuomo supported.
With a crack epidemic spreading, the governor sought to toughen penalties for selling the drug. Mr. Miller, as chairman of the Assembly committee with jurisdiction over criminal justice legislation, fought Cuomo’s proposal. He objected in particular to a provision calling for a sentence of up to life in prison for sellers of as few as three vials of crack, about $50 worth, arguing that small-time offenders would be punished too harshly. A version of the legislation that mandated somewhat lesser penalties was passed in 1988.
As speaker, Mr. Miller worked to protect social welfare and education programs in the preparation of the state budget. In 1989, he pressed successfully to eliminate cuts in Cuomo’s proposed budget that, he said, would have hurt schools and recipients of Medicaid and welfare.
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But like Cuomo, Mr. Miller opposed efforts to restore capital punishment in the state. (It was reinstated in a law enacted in the 1990s, after both men had left office, though a court ruling made the law inoperable.) Also like Cuomo, Mr. Miller opposed efforts to undo abortion rights.
Melvin Howard Miller was born in Brooklyn on July 24, 1939, to Henry and Frieda (Chaiet) Miller. His father drove a milk truck, and his mother was a homemaker.
He served in the Army Reserve before graduating from Brooklyn College in 1961 and New York University School of Law in 1964. He was first elected to the Assembly in 1970 to represent Flatbush and nearby areas.
He married Elizabeth Mohr in 1961. In addition to his wife, with whom he lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he leaves a daughter, Susan Miller; a son, Lawrence; a brother, Irwin; a sister, Darlene Feldman; and four grandchildren.