Court Rules for Shoplifter in 3-Strikes Case

A federal appeals court carved a small but important exception to the state’s rigorous three-strikes law Monday, ruling that a 25-years-to-life sentence for stealing a $199 VCR amounted to unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment.”

In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco called the case “exceedingly rare,” saying the defendant, Isaac Ramirez, had been given a sentence that was “grossly disproportionate to the crimes committed, in violation of the 8th Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld California’s three-strikes law. That 5-4 decision held that sentencing thieves and petty criminals to life in prison for a third offense did not violate the 8th Amendment in most cases, but held out the possibility that some cases might be exceptions.

Monday’s decision is the first to say that a specific case is one of those exceptions, said USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who argued the case at the Supreme Court last year.

“So the ruling says there is still a door open” for inmates to challenge three-strikes sentences “even though they will rarely succeed,” he said.

California’s three-strikes law was enacted in the wake of the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas by Richard A. Davis, a paroled kidnapper. The law permits prosecutors to charge a minor offense as a serious felony if the criminal has other convictions on his record.

Ramirez’s case illustrates the law’s reach. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to two nonviolent shoplifting offenses in Orange County. Under a plea agreement, he served a sentence of just more than six months in county jail.

Five years later, when Ramirez was caught walking out of a Sears store in Montclair with the VCR, he immediately surrendered to authorities and returned the stolen equipment. When asked why he took the goods, Ramirez replied, “I don’t know. I did something stupid.”

At the time, he had filed for bankruptcy after the failure of two businesses that he had started after getting out of jail.

Under California law, San Bernardino County prosecutors could have charged Ramirez with a petty theft misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in county jail. Instead, the prosecutors charged him with one count of petty theft with a prior theft-related conviction. Crimes of that sort, known as “wobblers” in California courts, can be charged either as felonies or misdemeanors.

“That exercise of prosecutorial discretion had grave consequences for Ramirez,” wrote 9th Circuit Judge Kim M. Wardlaw. “After he was convicted of this ‘wobbler’ felony, the jury found that Ramirez’s 1991 ‘robbery convictions’ were ‘strikes’ for purposes of California’s Three Strikes law.”

A San Bernardino County Superior Court judge, saying that there was a “constant pattern” of criminal activity, had sentenced Ramirez to 25 years to life in prison, with no eligibility for parole until he had served 25 years.

The California Court of Appeal affirmed the sentence, saying that “recidivism poses a danger to society, justifying the imposition of longer sentences for subsequent offenses.”

Ramirez filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court in Los Angeles. In March 2002, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Wistrich issued a ruling in which he noted that Ramirez’s sentence was more severe than California would impose for most violent crimes, including second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, rape and sexual assault on a minor. Had Ramirez not been prosecuted under the three-strikes law, his sentence for stealing the VCR would have been one year in jail for a misdemeanor or three years in prison for a felony, Wistrich noted.

In June 2002, U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts affirmed all of Wistrich’s findings and recommendations and ordered that Ramirez be released from Ironwood State Prison in Blythe.

The California attorney general’s office appealed, setting the stage for Monday’s ruling.

In the meantime, Ramirez moved to Corona and got a job as a maintenance worker at the New Hope Family Worship Center, a Pentecostal Church. He has been under parole supervision since then “without incident,” the 9th Circuit noted in Monday’s ruling.

“The sentence imposed upon Ramirez for his three shoplifting offenses is more severe than the sentence he would have faced had any one of his three crimes been murder, manslaughter or rape,” wrote Wardlaw, who was appointed by President Clinton. She was joined in her opinion by Judge John Noonan, appointed by President Reagan.

That gap indicates a “gross disproportionality” between the gravity of the offense and the sentence, Wardlaw wrote.

Unlike the “lengthy recidivist histories” of the defendants in the two cases ruled on by the Supreme Court last year, Ramirez had a limited criminal record involving only two nonviolent offenses, she noted.

“It is doubtful that California’s Three Strikes law, passed largely in response to the infamous” Klaas murder, “was ever intended to apply to a nonviolent, three-time shoplifter such as Ramirez,” Wardlaw wrote. “Neither the ‘harm caused or threatened to the victim or society,’ nor the ‘absolute magnitude’ of Ramirez’s three shoplifts justifies the Three Strikes sentence in this case.”

Ramirez argued the case on his own behalf and clearly impressed the judges, including Andrew Kleinfeld, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, who dissented.

Ramirez argued “so well that I did not realize until well into his argument that he was the petitioner and not a lawyer for the petitioner,” Kleinfeld wrote.

Kleinfeld said he agreed with the majority that “the sentence is inappropriately harsh.... Even Hammurabi limited the penalty to an eye for an eye.”

“The goals of reaffirming societal norms and of just retribution are disserved as much by an excessively harsh sentence as by an excessively lenient one,” Kleinfeld said, adding that “our societal norm against stealing is not intense enough to justify a sentence comparable to what people get for rape or murder.”

Nonetheless, Kleinfeld said, the court’s decision was wrong because it did not show sufficient deference to the conclusions of the California appeals court, which upheld Ramirez’s sentence.

In a telephone interview, Ramirez said, “I feel great. It’s been a long, long battle. I am very grateful that justice has prevailed. I am thankful to God for His hand in this.” Several ministers at the church where Ramirez works as a maintenance man wrote letters on his behalf and came to the oral argument in his case.

Hallye Jordan, a spokeswoman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, said state prosecutors had not decided yet whether they would appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last month, the Criminal Justice Policy Institute of Washington, D.C., reported that the three-strikes law had had little impact on violent crime, while costing taxpayers $8 billion to imprison tens of thousands of felons, most of them for nonviolent offenses.

There are about 360 inmates in California serving life sentences for petty theft with a prior felony under the three-strikes law and about 600 serving life sentences for possession of small amounts of drugs.