THREE STRIKES FOR CRIMINALS

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In the United States, habitual offender laws (commonly referred to as three-strikes laws) were first implemented on March 7,  1994 and are part of the United States Justice Department's Anti-Violence Strategy. 

The expression "Three strikes and you are out" is derived from baseball, where a batter against whom three strikes are recorded strikes out.

These laws require both a severe violent felony and two other previous convictions by a convicted felon to serve a mandatory life sentence in prison. The purpose of the laws is to drastically increase the punishment of those convicted of more than two serious crimes.

Twenty-eight states have some form of a "three-strikes" law. A person accused under such laws is referred to in a few states (notably Connecticut and Kansas) as a "persistent offender", while Missouri uses the unique term "prior and persistent offender". In most jurisdictions, only crimes at the felony level qualify as serious offenses.                                                                 

However misdemeanor or wobbler offenses can qualify for application of the three-strikes law in California, whose harsh application has been the subject of controversy.

The three-strikes law significantly increases the prison sentences of persons convicted of a felony who have been previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies, and limits the ability of these offenders to receive a punishment other than a life sentence.

The first true Three-Strikes law was passed in 1993, when Washington State voters gave their approval for Initiative593. California passed its own Three Strikes law in 1994, when their voters passed Proposition 184^[ by an overwhelming majority, with 72% in favor and 28% against. The Initiative proposed to the voters had the title of Three Strikes and You're Out, referring to de facto life imprisonment after being convicted of three violent or serious felonies which are listed under California Penal Code section 1192.7.

The concept swiftly spread to other states, but none of them chose to adopt a law as sweeping as California's. By 2004, twenty-six states and the federal government had laws that satisfy the general criteria for designation as "three-strikes" statutes—namely, that a third felony conviction brings a sentence of 20 to life where 20 years must be served before becoming parole eligible. A 1997 study found that in California, "the three-strikes law did not decrease serious crime or petty theft rates below the level expected on the basis of pre-existing trends.

Three-strikes laws have been cited as an example of the McDonaldization of punishment, in which the focus of criminological and penological interest has shifted away from retribution and treatment tailored to the individual offender and toward the control of high-risk groups based on aggregations and statistical averages. A three-strikes system achieves uniformity in punishment of criminals in a certain class (viz., three-time offenders) in a way that is analogous to how a fast food restaurant achieves uniformity of its product

The following states have enacted three-strikes laws:

·        New York has employed a habitual felon statute since 1797.

·        North Carolina has had a law dealing with habitual felons since 1967, but the law was amended in 1994 and now means that a third conviction for any violent felony (which includes any Class A, B, C, D or E Felony) will result in a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

·        Maryland has had a habitual felon statute for violent offenders since 1975. The law was amended in 1994, meaning that a fourth conviction for a crime of violence mandates a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

·        Alabama has had a habitual felon statute for serious and violent felons since 1977, providing for up to life imprisonment, and includes a mandatory life sentence without parole for three or more felony convictions for any crime and one of those convictions were for any offense classified as a Class A Felony (10–99 years or life).

·        Delaware has had a three-strikes law providing up to life imprisonment for serious felonies since 1973, when the Delaware Criminal Code, contained under Part I, Title 11 of the Delaware Codembecame effective.

·        Texas has had a three-strikes with mandatory life sentence since 1952   for any felonies committed.

In Rummel v. Estelle (1980), the US Supreme Court upheld Texas' statute, which arose from a case involving a refusal to repay $120.75 paid for air conditioning repair that was, depending on the source cited, either considered unsatisfactory or not performed at all  where the defendant had been convicted of two prior felony convictions, and where the total amount involved from all three felonies was around $230.

·        In 1994: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Wisconsin, and Tennessee. Tennessee is one of the few states, together with Georgia and South Carolina, that mandates life without parole for two or more convictions for the most serious violent crimes, including murder, rape, child sexual abuse, aggravated cases of robbery.

·        In 1995: Arkansas, Florida, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah, Georgia and Vermont. Georgia has a "two strikes" law, also known as the "seven deadly sins" law, which mandates a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for two or more convictions of murder, rape, armed robbery, kidnapping, aggravated sexual battery, aggravated sodomy, or aggravated child molestation or any combination of those offenses. 

·        In 1996: South Carolina. South Carolina also has a "two strikes" law for crimes known as a "most serious offense", which are crimes like murder, rape, attempted murder, armed robbery, etc. whereas, the "three strikes" law applies to "serious offences" which are many drug offenses, other violent crimes like burglary, robbery, arson, etc. and even serious nonviolent crimes like insurance fraud, forgery, counterfeit, etc. Two convictions or three convictions under these provisions will get the offender life in prison.

 Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee are the only states in the United States to date that have "two strikes" laws for the most serious violent crimes, such as murder, rape, serious cases of robbery, etc. and they all mandate a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for a conviction of any such crimes a second time around.

These laws take the decisions of judges with respect to punishment out of the hands of their hands.

Quite  frankly, I think that criminals who haven’t been deterred from committing violent crimes after having been severely punished for the second time. are a risk to society and should be taken out of circulation permanently.

The efficacy of three strikes laws has been a topic of contention among researchers since the first such piece of legislation was implemented in the United States nearly two decades ago. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to trend their impact through longitudinal analysis. This paper assesses the impact of three strikes legislation in California and Washington; two states which have implemented uniquely divergent forms of mandatory sentencing.  It addresses the effect of three strikes law on crime trends and prison populations therein. Results indicated that mandatory sentencing was associated with declines in some areas of crime. However, the decline observed nationally was not proportional to the scope of variations in three strikes laws and the impact on correction institutions has been minimal. This popular legislative response to crime may be in need of revision, specifically regarding the scope of punishable offenses.

The shear scope of the law’s applicability has come at substantial monetary cost to the State’s taxpayers. Studies conducted prior to the enactment of the California mandatory sentencing guidelines projected a 25 percent crime reduction at an annual cost of $5.5 billion if the law were fully implemented, which it was not (Meehan, 2000, pp. 25-26). Subsequently, between 1994 and 1997, the total crime rate in California dropped by 20.2 percent with a 13.8 percent reduction in violent crime. However, a 1999 Justice Policy Institute study concluded that the reduction was in no way attributed to three strikes law because crime rates had already started to decline in other regions of the United States prior to the law’s implementation and declared that California’s mandatory sentencing legislation was a failure.

In July 15th, 1995, in a Southern California city of Whittier, a 33-year-old black man named Curtis Wilkerson got up from a booth at McDonald’s, walked into a nearby mall and, within the space of two hours, turned himself into the unluckiest man on Earth.

After his mother died when he was 16, he fell in with a bad crowd, and in 1981 he served as a lookout in a series of robberies. He was quickly caught and sentenced to six years in prison. After he got out, he found work as a forklift operator, and distanced himself from his old life. But that day in the mall, something came over him. He wandered from store to store, bought a few things, still shaking his head about his girlfriend’s hair appointment. After a while, he drifted into a department store called Mervyn’s. Your typical chain store, full of mannequins and dress racks; they’re out of business today. Suddenly, a pair of socks caught his eye. He grabbed them and slipped them into a shopping bag.

Because Wilkerson had two prior convictions, both dating back to 1981, the shoplifting charge counted as a third strike against him. He was sentenced to 25 years to life, meaning that his first chance for a parole hearing would be in 25 years.

Wilkerson was unlucky, but he’s hardly alone. Despite the passage in late 2012 of a new state ballot initiative that prevents California from ever again giving out life sentences to anyone whose “third strike” is not a serious crime, thousands of people with the overwhelming majority of them being poor and nonwhite  remain imprisoned for a variety of offenses so absurd that any list of the unluckiest offenders reads like a macabre joke, a surrealistic comedy routine.

Have you heard the story about the guy who got life for stealing a slice of pizza? Or the guy who went away forever for lifting a pair of baby shoes? Or the one who got 50 to life for helping himself to five children’s videotapes from Kmart? How about the guy who got life for possessing 0.14 grams of meth? That last offender was a criminal mastermind by Three Strikes standards, as many others have been sentenced to life for holding even smaller amounts of drugs, including one poor sap who got the max for being in possession of 0.09 grams of black-tar heroin.

This Frankenstein’s monster of a mandatory-sentencing system isn’t just some localized bureaucratic accident, but the legacy of a series of complex political choices we all made as voters decades ago. California’s Three Strikes law has its origins in a terrible event from October 1993, when, in a case that outraged the entire country, a violent felon named Richard Allen Davis kidnapped and murdered an adolescent girl named Polly Klaas. Californians were determined to never again let a repeat offender get the chance to commit such a brutal crime, and so a year later, with the Klaas case still fresh in public memory, the state’s citizens passed Proposition 184 – the Three Strikes law – with an overwhelming 72 percent of the vote. Under the ballot initiative, anyone who had committed two serious felonies would effectively be sentenced to jail for life upon being convicted of a third crime.

President  Bill Clinton, stumped for a national Three Strikes law in his 1994 State of the Union address. When a federal version passed a year later, Clinton took special care to give squeamish wuss-bunny liberals a celebratory kick in the rear, using the same “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” rhetorical technique George W. Bush would make famous a few years later. “Narrow-interest groups on the left and the right didn’t want the bill to pass,” Clinton beamed, “and you can be sure the criminals didn’t either.”

A national craze was born. By the late Nineties, 24 states and the federal government had some kind of Three Strikes law. Not all are as harsh as the California law, but they all embrace the basic principle of throw-away-the-key mandatory sentencing for the incorrigible recidivist.

Once California’s Three Strikes law went into effect at midnight on March 8th, 1994, it would take just nine hours for it to claim its first hapless victim, a homeless schizophrenic named Lester Wallace with two nonviolent burglaries on his sheet, who attempted to steal a car radio near the University of Southern California campus.

Wallace was such an incompetent thief that he was still sitting in the passenger seat of the car by the time police arrived. He went to years he has suffered from seizures and developed severe back problems (forcing him to walk with a cane) and end-stage renal disease (leading to dialysis treatments three times a week). And even months after California voters chose to reform the law, the state still court and got 25 years to life. In prison, Wallace immediately became a target. He was sexually and physically attacked numerous times – there’s an incident in his file involving an inmate who told him, “Motherfucker, I’ll kill you if you don’t let me go up in you.” He was switched to protective custody, and over the ywon’t agree to release him. “He’s a guy who’s literally dying,” says Michael Romano, director of Stanford’s Three Strikes program and a key figure in the effort to reform the law, “and he’s still inside.”

Wallace’s conviction set off a cascade of preposterous outsize sentences of nonviolent petty criminals. In many of these cases, the punishments were not just cruel and disproportionate, but ridiculously so. Oftentimes, the absurdity would end up being compounded by the fact that there would be another case just like it, or five just like it, or 10 just like it. They began to blend together, and if you could keep track of them at all, it was only in shorthand.

Lester Wallace became the schizophrenic-on-dialysis-who-stole-a-car-radio­ case, not to be confused with Gary Ewing, the blind-in-one-eye AIDS patient, who died in prison last summer while serving 25 to life for the limping-out-of-a-sporting-­goods-store-with-three-golf-clubs-stuffed-down- his-pant-leg case.

T the Supreme Court decided life for shoplifting wasn’t cruel and unusual punishment.

There are at least two life-for-stealing  ­pizza cases. The most famous is Jerry Dewayne Williams, who got 25 to life after stealing a slice from a bunch of kids near Redondo Beach but was released after a paltry five years because of public furor. Still imprisoned, however, is one Shane Taylor, whose first two strikes came from a pair of nobody’s-home residential burglaries committed in a single two-week stretch in 1988. In both of these crimes, the only thing taken was a checkbook from one of the houses (in the other residence, nothing was missing, but Taylor’s fingerprint was found). With that checkbook, Taylor did exactly one thing: He bought a pizza with a forged check.

Eight years later, Taylor was standing outside his car, drinking beer and listening to tunes with his brother-in-law and a friend at a vista point in the little town of Porterville, near Sequoia National Forest, when a police car drove up. Officers investigated because they said they thought Taylor and his pals looked underage. They said they flashed a light on his front seat and spotted a baggie protruding from Taylor’s wallet. They grabbed the bag and claimed they found 0.14 grams of meth – the equivalent of a tenth of a sugar packet.

Taylor went on to become one of the rare Three Strikes defendants to remain free on bail, even after his conviction. A month later, at his sentencing hearing, presiding Judge Howard Broadman was stunned to see Taylor voluntarily show up to be sent away for life over a few grains of meth. “I never expected to see you again, frankly,” he said. “I thought a lot about you. And I said, ‘Jeez, if I were him, I’d do research and find out what country didn’t have extradition laws, because I don’t think I’d have showed back up.'”

Judge Broadman had no choice but to impose a 25-years-to-life sentence, but he made an unusual move to extend Taylor’s bail, pending appeal. For the next two years, Taylor worked and supported his family. Taylor lost his appeal, and surrendered himself to begin serving his sentence in 1998.

More than a decade later, Broadman had an attack of conscience and called Romano at Stanford. “I’m a conservative, tough-on-crime kind of guy,” he later explained, but “Shane Taylor was a mistake.” Broadman wrote a declaration on behalf of Taylor, supporting his petition for release. But Taylor is still in jail, three full years after the judge had his come-to-Jesus moment. When I spoke to Taylor by phone from Soledad correctional facility, the dominant emotion in his voice was sheer amazement. “It’s baffling to me that I’m still in here,” he says. “Even the judge says he’s done me wrong.”

As for why he did show up in court all those years ago, he says it’s simple: “I’m not the type to run out on my family,” he says. “And honestly? I never thought I’d get 25 years.”

Three Strikes turned out to be not only an abject failure but also a terrible embarrassment to the state of California. Politics and the law coincided to create a yin-yang cycle of endless, expensive stupidity: District attorneys were terrified of the political consequences of not seeking the max for every possible third strike (even when the cases were “wobblers,” what lawyers call a crime that could be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the circumstances, like petty theft), while judges were legally bound to impose maximum sentences whether they agreed with them or not.

Things got so bad so fast in California’s prisons, in fact, that the Supreme Court was ultimately forced to declare the state in violation of the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment, with Justice Anthony Kennedy citing the use of “telephone-booth-size cages without toilets” as one of the reasons he was ordering the state to slash its 140,000-plus prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. That decision came in 2011; a lower court had previously noted that it was an “uncontested fact” that a prisoner in California died once every six or seven days due to “constitutional deficiencies.”

 

 

Where some saw Three Strikes as a moral outrage, others seized on the financial burdens. Conceived as a way to keep child molesters in jail for life, Three Strikes more often became the world’s most expensive and pointlessly repressive homeless-care program. It costs the state about $50,000 per year to care for every prisoner, even more when the inmate is physically or mentally disabled – and some 40 percent of three-strikers are either mentally retarded or mentally ill. “Homeless guys on drugs, that was your typical third-striker,” says Romano. “And not that the money is the issue, but you could send hundreds of deserving people to college for the amount of money we were spending.”

 

 

The typical third-striker wasn’t just likely to be homeless and/or mentally ill – he was also very likely to be black. In California, blacks make up seven percent of the population, 28 percent of the prison population and 45 percent of the three-strikers.

 

 

into something that hurtled forward at light speed, but Just like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. As the years passed and word of great masses of nonviolent inmates serving insanely disproportionate terms began to spread in the legal community, it became clear that any attempt to repair the damage done by Three Strikes would be a painstaking, ungainly process at best. The fear of being tabbed “soft on crime” left politicians and prosecutors everywhere reluctant to lift their foot off the gas pedal for even a moment, and before long the Three Strikes punishment machine evolved moved backward only with great effort, fractions of a millimeter at a time.

 

 

The first break in the struggle against the law came in 2000, when Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, a hardcore Three Strikes advocate (you may remember him as the blow-dried shock-white head of hair who quarterbacked the O.J. Simpson case into one of the most embarrassing losses ever suffered by an American prosecutor’s office), lost a re-election bid to his former deputy, Steve Cooley, who campaigned against Garcetti’s embrace of the Three Strikes law. A month later, Cooley signed a special order indicating that his office – the largest prosecutor’s office in America – would no longer seek maximum sentences for minor offenders. Cooley’s unofficial reform would later provide the framework for the Proposition 36 ballot initiative that changed the law.

 

 

Around this same time, Romano, a Stanford Law grad who was clerking for a federal judge in Seattle, came across a pair of California cases that disturbed him greatly. One involved a Mexican immigrant sent to prison for life for taking the written portion of a DMV exam for a cousin who didn’t speak English. In the other, a man named Willie Joseph received a life sentence after helping an undercover policeman set up a $5 crack deal. “That case stuck with me,” says the bespectacled, quick-witted Romano. “Willie didn’t hurt anybody in those offenses.”

 

 

Romano eventually left his clerking job and returned to Stanford Law, with the idea of doing something about Three Strikes. There, he met up with professor David Mills, senior lecturer at the school, who was in the process of founding Stanford’s renowned clinical-education program, in which law students do active work in multiple disciplines – everything from Supreme Court litigation to prosecuting criminal cases. Mills is a man of big plans and big ideas, a sort of entrepreneurial intellectual who not only co-chairs the NAACP legal-defense­ fund but has also built several successful private businesses in the financial sector. Like Romano, Mills had hated Three Strikes from the start. But he also knew that, in the age of mass media and the sound bite, fixing the law would be a heavy lift. “It’s very easy to say, ‘Three strikes and you’re out,'” he says. “It’s a lot harder to say, ‘Well, wait a minute – do you mean three strikes, or do you mean three serious strikes? And what do you mean by “serious”?'”

 

 

Mills, Romano and Stanford decided to put together a Three Strikes program as part of the university’s clinical curriculum, the idea being that the school would represent inmates serving Three Strikes sentences and try to reverse or at least scale some of them back. Initially, the school saw this mainly as a teaching opportunity for students, but as Romano learned about what Cooley was up to in L.A., he saw an opportunity for something bigger. does “not sit as a ‘super legislature’ to second-guess” the states, despite the fact that that’s precisely what the Supreme Court has been doing for almost 250 years.

Cooley, in 2005, had ordered a review of Three Strikes cases – statewide, nearly 40 percent of them originated in L.A. County – and his staff came up with a list of some 60 names of inmates who had likely been over sentenced. Perhaps, Romano thought, Cooley’s office would work with Stanford to help fix some of those cases. He reached out to his office and the two groups immediately found common ground. There was even discussion at one point about Stanford working within the district attorney’s office to reverse old cases, but that was ultimately discarded in order to preserve the traditional adversarial legal structure – which made sense because, among other things, Cooley didn’t agree with Stanford about every single nonviolent inmate. Ultimately, the DA agreed that if the Stanford group challenged some of the more absurd Three Strikes cases, his office, on a select basis, might not oppose their efforts.

 

In the program’s initial stages, the Stanford team operated by filing habeas-corpus motions, asking courts to rule on whether or not this or that prisoner had been unlawfully detained. One of the first cases they took up involved a homeless man from Long Beach named Norman Williams, who had been on the list of 60 potentially excessive sentences uncovered in Cooley’s 2005 review.Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the \supreme \court defended the sentence as a “rational judgment.  She made that statement with a straight face.

 

 

Where some people see Three Strikes as a moral outrage, others are concened on the financial burdens to society in general. Conceived as a way to keep child molesters and other dangerous criminals in jail for life. the Three Strikes law more often became the world’s most expensive and pointlessly repressive homeless-care program. It costs the state about $50,000 per year to care for every prisoner, even more when the inmate is physically or mentally disabled – and some 40 percent of three-strikers are either mentally retarded or mentally ill. “Homeless guys on drugs, that was your typical third-striker,” says Romano. “And not that the money is the issue, but you could send hundreds of deserving people to college for the amount of money the law  was  spending to keep these minor criminals for life.