Supreme Court Declines to Hear Three-Strikes Case

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to California’s three-strikes law by a man who was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after stealing a bottle of vitamins from a grocery store.

The court refused Tuesday to hear an appeal in which Michael Riggs said the state sentencing law, which provides for longer sentences for repeat offenders, violated his rights and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer voted to hear Riggs’ appeal, but four votes are needed to grant full review.

Three other justices said Riggs’ case raised “obviously substantial” issues, but that they were willing to let lower courts consider them first.

“It is prudent . . . for this court to await review by other courts,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for himself and Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Riggs was convicted of shoplifting a bottle of vitamins from an Albertsons store in Banning in 1995. When arrested, Riggs had a hypodermic syringe hidden in one of his socks.

He had been convicted of a variety of crimes: vehicle theft, possession of a controlled substance, forgery, receiving stolen property, attempted burglary, check fraud and robbery.

In a lengthy appeal he wrote himself in Corcoran State Prison, Riggs contended that his lengthy sentence violated his right of due process and wrongly punished him for crimes committed before the three-strikes law was enacted.

Riggs had not raised those issues when he appealed his sentence in state courts.

The Supreme Court appeal also argued that the sentence violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because it was disproportionate to the crime.

A state appeals court rejected that argument in 1997, and the California Supreme Court last year refused to hear Riggs’ ensuing appeal.

“Someone who commits a cold-blooded, premeditated murder with a deadly weapon receives a maximum sentence of 26 years to life, and is eligible for parole in 17 years, four months” under one California homicide law, Riggs said in his appeal.

In contrast, he will not be eligible for parole until after serving 25 years.

State prosecutors urged the justices to reject Riggs’ appeal, saying the California law complies with previous Supreme Court decisions on sentencing recidivist criminals.

In 1980, the court upheld the life sentence of a Texas man whose three convictions were for credit card fraud worth $80, forging a $28 check and falsely obtaining $120. That inmate was eligible for parole after serving 12 years.

The court in 1983 overturned a South Dakota man’s life sentence for six nonviolent crimes, but his sentence carried no chance of parole.

And in 1991, the court upheld a life sentence without possibility of parole for a Michigan man convicted of possessing a small amount of cocaine. The court ruled then that the Constitution bars only those sentences that are “grossly disproportionate” to the crime.