Jesse Jackson Calls ‘3-Strikes’ Laws Unfair and ‘Fear-Driven’

Launching a statewide media salvo, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. on Monday decried sentencing laws that he termed an unfair “rush of fear-driven legislation.”

Rigid federal sentencing laws that carry minimum terms of five or 10 years behind bars for certain drug offenses are “unjust,” he said. So too, he said, is the state’s 2-year-old “three-strikes” law, which carries a penalty of 25 years to life for a third conviction.

Flanked by Los Angeles County Public Defender Mike Judge, who asserted that most of those charged with a third “strike” in Los Angeles courts are black, Jackson said the whole notion of “three strikes” is wrong.

“Where did the whole idea of playing baseball with people’s lives come from in the first place?” Jackson asked at a news conference at the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

Saying he intended to deliver much the same speech Wednesday in San Francisco, Jackson also announced an April bus caravan up and down California and a conference in May in Los Angeles designed to call attention to criminal justice issues.

Jackson answered the question he posed about baseball by continuing the metaphor.

Instead of “three strikes and you’re out,” he asserted, taxpayers would be better off if public funds were spent on a policy of “four balls and you’re on”--the four “balls” being prenatal care, education, access to college and jobs.

A first step, Jackson said, would be giving the discretion back to judges that “three strikes” has taken away. “No judge can with integrity obey this law and maintain their moral authority as a judge,” Jackson said.

Last week, Superior Court Judge David Yaffe accused Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti of a “gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion” for seeking a “three-strikes” conviction against a homeless man accused of possessing a small amount of cocaine.

After the man was acquitted, Garcetti said his office handled the case properly. Jackson sidestepped a question about whether Garcetti--who is running for reelection--deserves a second term, saying that the “three-strikes” law should be reviewed.

Later in the day, Garcetti announced that he would meet Thursday with Jackson. “The Rev. Jackson requested the meeting and Gil agreed to meet with him to discuss our ‘three-strikes’ policy and the law,” said Garcetti’s spokeswoman, Suzanne Childs.

Judge, who followed Jackson to the microphones at the news conference, noted that Garcetti is “very vigorously enforcing the law.”

Figures from the public defender’s office indicate that 56% of those charged with a third “strike” in Los Angeles County are African American, Judge said.

About 50% of those charged with a second strike are black, Judge said.

He said that those numbers were culled from about 14,000 cases that his office had handled from March 1994--when the “three-strikes” law took effect--through earlier this month. The public defender’s office, he said, handles about 75% of all “three-strikes cases” in the county.

Judge added that 75% of those charged with a second or third strike are charged with a “nonviolent, nonserious” felony.

The figures, he said, raise “questions that must be answered.” He suggested that experts “carefully study” the law and its impact.

Childs asserted later Monday that race plays no part in decisions by the district attorney’s office to file strikes. “Basically, our office is colorblind when we handle cases,” she said.

Garcetti’s position is that the law requires him to file second and third strikes, she said. But he has given discretion to deputies to strike a prior conviction when it is “in the interests of justice” or when a case presents “problems of proof,” she said.