A Decent Deal for Convicts

In January 2001, Ronnie Young was five years into a nine-year term for burglary at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo when Bud Stocking, a pipe fitter hired from outside the prison, began choking on a piece of food. Stocking motioned to another inmate to help him. That inmate refused, but Young performed the Heimlich maneuver and saved Stocking’s life.

Under a 1982 California law, Young should get a year shaved off his sentence for “perform[ing] a heroic act in a life-threatening situation” while in prison. Young’s prior felony conviction had made his burglary conviction a second strike under California’s three-strikes sentencing law. But because Young has kept his nose clean in prison, the Department of Corrections has already awarded him the maximum time credit allowed under the three-strikes law. For that reason, the department denied Young’s request to be released a year sooner because he saved Stocking’s life.

Now a Ventura appeals court has agreed with the Corrections Department on narrow grounds. The judges were excessively timid. Young should get his one-year reduction.

The three-strikes law, passed in 1994, has become the electrified third rail of California politics--judges and politicians touch it at their peril. Intended to close the revolving prison door, the law is stricter than similar measures in most other states, where the third strike has to be a serious or violent crime. In California, any third felony conviction, sometimes even for simple drug possession or stealing a couple of videotapes, sends the defendant to prison for life. Efforts to amend the law to reserve its harshest penalties for the most serious crimes have failed.

State judges also have shied away from tempering the law’s harshest effects. So the Ventura appellate court held that the three-strikes law didn’t explicitly allow the credit an inmate could earn under the heroic act law to be added to those allowed under three strikes. The Legislature should amend the three-strikes law, it suggested, to allow both types.

Yes, the Legislature should explicitly allow the Corrections Department to reward a “strike” offender who saves a life. And lawmakers ought to muster the courage to limit third strikes to serious or violent crimes. But the current law, by not explicitly forbidding it, would seem to allow three-strike inmates credit for heroism. Common sense, not to mention ordinary decency, should have led the majority to give Ronnie Young the break he earned.