New Measure to Help Valley, Officials Say

They may not live in the most crime-ridden corner of California, but violence-weary residents of the San Fernando Valley will surely benefit from the “three strikes, and you’re out” legislation signed into law Monday by Gov. Pete Wilson, local law enforcement officials said.

Police, prosecutors and even judges said they were unfamiliar with the fine points of the final version of the bill, approved last week by the state Senate, which is still considering four similar measures that were also passed by the Assembly.

Some have opposed the law as unworkable, too expensive and too Draconian a penalty for many repeat, nonviolent offenders. But now that it is law, they vowed to immediately begin studying it, and using it, as a tool for keeping the Valley’s most violent offenders off the streets.

However the details shake out, most of those interviewed agreed that the message the new law sends--that third-time felony offenders will be put away for good--will have a deterrent effect on criminals.

“If you are convicted of these (three felonies), you are gone. There is no way to wiggle out of this, plead out of this, mitigate this. You are removed from society,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Kyle Jackson.

“Will it make it easier for police officers? I think so, I hope so.”

Like other law enforcement officials, Jackson said Valley residents will welcome the law now that the violence once found largely in the inner city has begun to make its way north of Mulholland Drive and into their tree-lined neighborhoods. In notorious crimes during 1993, a West Valley woman was slain as she picked up her daughter at a Bible study class, an elderly man was killed for his Mercedes at a gas station, a pregnant woman was stabbed to death at an ATM, and a serial child molester stalked children en route to local schools.

Jackson, head of detectives at the LAPD’s Devonshire Station, which has jurisdiction over the area where some of those attacks occurred, said the law will help police regain the upper hand on criminals and reassure residents, if only symbolically at first.

“The public has no idea how much violent crime occurs; this will cause the pendulum to swing in a different direction,” Jackson said.

The measure doubles the current terms for a second violent or serious felony and mandates a term of 25 years to life for two-time serious or violent offenders who commit any third felony.

The bill went into effect when Wilson signed it Monday; anyone who commits a crime and is arrested the moment after he signed it will be facing a new and harsher criminal justice system. Prosecutors are now barred from entering into plea bargains, and judges will be severely restricted in their discretion to limit sentences.

Some judges predicted that defendants will demand trials when they otherwise would have accepted plea bargains. Opponents said defense attorneys risk accusations of malpractice if they allow clients to plead guilty to even a first offense if the crime could later be counted as a “strike.”

Some defense lawyers already are preparing to attack the law, contending that life sentences are cruel and unusual punishment when applied to felons convicted of property crimes.

Dennis Zine, a veteran Valley police sergeant and former City Council candidate, questioned whether the law will survive such attacks after the societal outrage that fueled its passage dies down.

Whether “this is just another window-dressing remedy, or really effective in reducing the number of predators on the street, remains to be seen,” said Zine, now director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the officers’ union.

Zine said other supposed deterrents, such as the death penalty and the “use a gun, go to prison” law, haven’t worked because loopholes, political opposition and the judicial process have weakened them.

Another outspoken former police official from the Valley area, Ed Davis, said Monday that he supports the concept of the law, whatever its faults and loopholes.

Davis said he spent 23 years fighting for better ways to keep repeat violent offenders off the streets, first as police chief in Los Angeles and then as a state senator. But he said he was rebuffed time and again by liberals whom he described as being soft on crime.

Now, Davis says, the new law will finally allow police and prosecutors “to slow down the revolving door” allowing dangerous career criminals in and out of prison.

“Right now we lock up 100,000 people at any given time,” said Davis, a former Chatsworth and Santa Clarita resident. “If we have to double that, it’s the price we have to pay to safeguard us against those who would rape and murder.”

In signing the bill into law Monday, Wilson called it the toughest and most sweeping criminal sentencing law in the state’s history, aimed at putting habitual felons behind bars for life. But Wilson’s own Corrections Department estimates that the new law will lead to a $21-billion prison building boom and a huge increase in operating costs. And some prosecutors warn that the statute is too broad and may produce unintended consequences.

Opponents include Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block and Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who described the law Monday as “crazy” but promised to uphold it anyway.

Garcetti has said that only violent offenses should be considered in the “three strikes.” Under the law as written, he said, a juvenile with two residential burglary convictions who passes bad checks years later could wind up in prison for life.

Garcetti’s prosecutors are largely undecided--mostly because few understand the law, or have even seen it.

After the state Senate passed it last Thursday, a handful of Garcetti’s top aides began distilling the complex, five-page treatise into terms that prosecutors can understand. They hope to have an understandable memo on prosecutors’ desks by this morning. That will fall well within the 48-hour period in which those arrested after the bill was signed must be arraigned or released, said Assistant Dist. Atty. R. Dan Murphy, one of Garcetti’s three top aides.

Still, Murphy conceded, confusion reigns among prosecutors.

“We’re boiling it down for our lawyers and distilling it for them, into plain old lawyer talk, which isn’t always all that clear either,” he said.

“We have been working furiously over the weekend,” said Murphy. “We don’t want to have 900 lawyers wading through this five-page bill and coming to their own conclusions as to what the law means.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Carroll, who runs the D. A.’s Van Nuys branch, said he supports the law. “We look forward to getting rid of our career violent offenders,” Carroll said. “I would hope they leave the Valley, leave the county, and leave the state. We could even have a ceremony in which we give them bus tickets.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert L. Cohen, who files criminal complaints in the Van Nuys branch, called it “long overdue--society coddles these people over and over again.”

Most prosecutors appeared to support the law in concept, but were unsure which of the four versions in the Legislature was going into effect.

Some were unclear as to whether the third felony had to be a violent crime. Some prosecutors--including Garcetti--expressed concern that any third felony, even a burglary, would lock up a criminal for life.

Others questioned whether juvenile offenses would count.

“I think it should apply to juveniles because statistically most of the violent offenses are committed by individuals between the ages of 15 and 16 and about 22 to 24,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter S. Berman, another prosecutor based in Van Nuys. “It’s those individuals that if you can stop their careers early enough, you can prevent a lot of violence being perpetrated upon the community.”

Berman said he believes that the law would have a deterrent effect, if only to show whether criminals are aware enough of such laws that some will flee to other states where penalties are not so harsh.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Fisch, prosecutor of career criminals at Van Nuys and San Fernando courthouses, said many of the people that she is now prosecuting would have fallen under the new law.

“I have a couple right now that have prior murder convictions from the early ‘70s,” Fisch said, “and they would all fall into this law because this third offense would put them over the line, and that would be the end of it.”

Fisch predicted more of her cases would go to trial “because people aren’t going to plead guilty as readily.”

But in the long run, she said, it will help take the habitual offenders off the streets for good.

Instead, employees at the new state prison in Lancaster could be the ones in contact with those inmates. Critics of the law say it will keep three-time losers locked up far beyond the point where they are violent or dangerous, and that society will end up warehousing harmless, aging convicts.

Critics also raise the grim possibility that felons, realizing that they are looking at years behind bars, may decide to leave no witnesses to their crimes.

Few academics, judges, prosecutors or defense lawyers interviewed Monday believed that the “three-strikes” law will deter many of the most violent criminals--youthful offenders.

David Meyers, acting public defender in Los Angeles, said, “It’s not going to do anything about crime. . . . Folks responsible for crime are youthful. Young people get created all the time.”

Several judges refused to comment. San Fernando Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen, chairman of the Criminal Law and Procedures Committee of the California Judges Assn., said his organization voted to take no position on the law. But it did ask Wilson “to look at the bill and determine the impact that it would have on judicial discretion and the number of trials that it would create in the criminal justice system.”

Judge Judith M. Ashmann, who supervises operations in San Fernando Superior Court, anticipated that the law would generate more cases, but she said the situation was manageable.

“We are going to do whatever the Legislature says has to be done,” Ashmann said. “If more cases go to trial, we’ll accommodate and we’ll try the cases.”

Meyer is a Times staff writer and Mrozek is a special correspondent. Times staff writers Jerry Weintraub and Dan Morain also contributed to this article.