‘3 Strikes’ Too Harsh

I was dismissed from juror seat 5, Courtroom 47, County of Ventura. Thank God, I wasn’t asked to judge whether or not repeat offender Roosevelt McCowan stole $300 worth of Sav-On merchandise the day after California’s “three-strikes” law went into effect.

If the prosecution had not given me a preemptive dismissal, perhaps fearing my sympathies as a teacher of ethics at a Catholic school, I would have dismissed myself. For I had learned what jurors in this case are not supposed to know--that due to the three-strikes law, Roosevelt McCowan, if convicted, would go to prison for 25 years to life.

Discovering this made it possible for me to make an informed moral decision about my inability to serve on this jury. I knew that I could not, in conscience, condemn a man to life imprisonment for the nonviolent theft of $300. But the drastic application of the three-strikes law to this case is being carefully kept from jurors.

How, then, can they act on their consciences? Don’t jurors have the right to know what’s at stake? I would quickly eliminate myself from any murder trial because I’m opposed to the death penalty. Knowing the usual consequences of a guilty verdict is part of knowing what you are getting yourself in for on a jury case.

In Mr. McCowan’s case, it is as if a court said, “You are only being asked to determine the facts about a simple theft,” without telling the jurors that a new law would be applied that demanded that the hands of the thief be cut off as punishment. Knowing this, how many of us would agree to sit on such a jury?

LESLIE CARSON, Santa Paula