2 Campaigns Bid to Ease 3 Strikes

A pair of campaigns was launched Tuesday to overhaul California’s popular three-strikes law so that its 25-year-to-life sentences would bypass petty thieves and apply only to serious and violent felons.

Advocates said the two plans would bring the 1994 law closer into line with voters’ intentions when they enacted Proposition 184, which created the pioneering “three strikes and you are out” statute.

Under the law, the third-strike sentence of 25 years to life behind bars without parole is imposed when a felon is convicted of a third felony on top of two previous serious or violent felonies. The third felony need not be serious or violent.

The law gives judges and prosecutors the discretion to disregard certain previous convictions so they cannot be counted toward a third strike.

However, supporters of the law, including Secretary of State Bill Jones and victims’ rights advocates, said they would fight efforts to change the law, insisting that it has worked successfully to reduce crime in California and that changing it would give criminals a card to “get out of jail free.”

At a news conference, Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) countered that argument and announced the introduction of a bill, AB 1790, to restrict the heaviest penalties of the three-strikes statute to criminals convicted of serious or violent felonies.

She noted that in November, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law’s 50-year-long jailing of shoplifter Leandro Andrade was “cruel and unusual” because it was disproportionate to the relatively minor crime he had committed, the robbery of videos from a Kmart in San Bernardino County.

Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer is appealing the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Flanked by other liberal Democrats, including Sens. Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, Richard Alarcon of Sylmar and Gloria Romero of Los Angeles, and Assemblyman Carl Washington of Paramount, Goldberg conceded Tuesday that she would face an uphill battle to push the bill through an election-year session of the Legislature, and get a signature from Gov. Gray Davis and approval by the voters in 2004.

Goldberg recalled that the Legislature and voters were told in 1994 that the proposed three-strikes law would apply to inmates convicted of serious or violent felonies, but from the outset it has also been imposed on petty crooks charged with less serious misdemeanor crimes, usually punishable by no more than a year in the county jail and a $1,000 fine.

In cases such as shoplifting, the relatively minor offenses can be toughened into felonies by laws that allow enhancing them to a potential third-strike offense.

The federal court did not overturn the three-strikes law, but left the door open for hundreds of inmates to individually seek reduction of their sentences or release from prison.

Goldberg said such case-by-case suits would run up heavy taxpayer expenses, choke the courts, and take prosecutors and police officers away from other important cases.

“Let the time fit the crime,” Goldberg said.

At least half a dozen bills have been introduced since 1994 that sought to modify the statute to apply only to murders, rapists and other major criminals. Each has failed.

Goldberg said she expects a better outcome this time because the issue of fairness will “resonate with people.”

Even so, she said that in this election year, it “will be difficult” to get it passed, even by a majority vote in the Democrat-dominated Legislature.

Jones, a Republican candidate for governor who as an assemblyman wrote the 1994 three-strikes bill, called the law a “huge success” in reducing crime in California and accused those who would amend it of “working on behalf of the criminals instead of victims.”

Meantime, an organization known as Citizens Against Violent Crime announced the kickoff of a campaign to gather 419,260 voter signatures to qualify an initiative similar to Goldberg’s bill for the November ballot.

Leo McElroy, a public relations executive and campaign consultant, said recent polling by the firm of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin and Associates found that 65% of Californians support amending the law to apply only to violent felonies.