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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
In California, even some tough-on-crime politicians are beginning to fight a law that sends people to jail for life for petty theft.
May 9, 2000 | Joe Wilcox, a lay minister from the rural Northern California community of Christian Valley, supported California's "three strikes" law when voters overwhelmingly approved it in 1994. But six years later, while on a jury that was considering putting a man away for life for stealing a bicycle, he couldn't do it.
Wilcox was one of two jurors selected to sit on a three-strikes case in the Sacramento suburbs of Placer County involving Steven Bell, who had been arrested for stealing a $300 bicycle from the garage of a home in the middle of the night. The burglary occurred in February 1999, and an accomplice of Bell's also was arrested and convicted in the case. She got probation.
Bell had two strikes against him -- burglary convictions in Nevada from 1984, when he was 19, and from 1989, when he was 25.
"I told the judge, 'I'm sorry, I just cannot do this,'" Wilcox recalled. "From a moral standpoint I will not take part in a process that sends a man to jail for life for stealing a $300 bicycle."
Another juror joined Wilcox, and the judge removed the two from the panel. Without the dissenters, the jury came back quickly with a unanimous vote that the bicycle theft should count as a third strike. Bell is scheduled to be sentenced in the case next month and faces 25 years to life -- a punishment equal to or worse than the punishment many murderers face.
Like Wilcox, many Californians are having doubts about the state's three-strikes law, which is the toughest in the nation. There are bipartisan efforts in the California Legislature and among voters to relax the strictest parts of the anti-crime measure, which sends criminals to prison for 25 years to life for a third felony conviction.
Meanwhile, police chiefs, legal experts and jurors called to hear three-strikes cases are questioning whether California needs to step back from the most controversial part of the law, which allows prosecutors to count even the most minor crimes as a "third strike" that makes a criminal eligible for the maximum sentence.
Facing a barrage of stories about criminals being packed off to decades spent in prison for swiping pizzas, stealing bicycles or shoplifting, lawmakers and other advocates for change are looking to soften the impact of the law.
Opponents of the law are trying to get an initiative placed on the California general election ballot in November that would modify the measure to make it less strict. They need 419,260 petition signatures by June 1 to qualify for the ballot. The state Assembly's public safety committee voted 5-3 last month to adopt a measure that would change the law so that a third strike could not be declared unless the crime involved was a violent felony.
At a rally outside the Capitol building after the vote, dozens of opponents of three strikes and family members of prisoners convicted under the law pleaded for a change in the way California administers its justice system.
"If you steal $10 worth of toilet tissue at the Rite Aid, that's not something we should put you in jail for life for," said Assemblyman Rod Wright, D-Los Angeles, who sponsored the proposed change in the law. "We've got to distinguish between people who are really violent criminals and people who are just down on their luck," he said, referring to the many drug addicts who have been sentenced under the law.
Wright has an unlikely ally in Orange County Republican Scott Baugh, who, while not willing to go as far as Wright, at the very least wants petty theft and drug cases to be taken off the list of third-strike offenses that bring the maximum prison sentence.
"I'm one who believes that the three-strikes legislation has been the single biggest deterrent to crime in California," Baugh told Salon.com. "That's not to say it hasn't had some erroneous applications." Baugh said he also wants a study of all third-strike cases that involve convictions made before the law was passed in 1994, to make sure only those who deserve three-strikes prosecutions are getting them.
Currently, about three dozen states have a three-strikes law of some sort on the books. California's was the second in the nation, with Washington passing one before the Golden State's voters jumped on the idea. But unlike California, most other states require that a third strike be a serious offense, such as a violent felony. That makes a big difference, as is evident from the incarceration numbers that other states have reported.
In a study conducted in 1998, five years after three-strikes mania swept the nation, researchers found that California had sent 40,000 criminals to prison as second or third strikers, and that Georgia had sent 2,000. All the other states combined and the federal government had sentenced fewer than 1,500, according to the study by the Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy in Washington, D.C.
"While political rhetoric dominated much of the debate preceding the adoption of these laws -- with claims that three-strikes laws were an essential tool for crime control and the only way to ensure that violent felons were kept off the street -- the laws that resulted have had only minimal impact," the study found.
