No, this isn’t an “Opening Day of Baseball” (yawn) post.
The US Supreme Court is going to take a formal look at Three Strikes laws, in particular California’s, which is one of the toughest in the nation.
The idea behind Three Strikes laws is attractive: if someone has shown that they are an habitual criminal, then lock ’em up for good.
The problem is that what constitutes a strike, or the third strike, varies from state to state, leading to what seems to be injustices, as in the cases being brought before the Supremes. In one of the two, a man who was caught stuffing video tapes down his pants was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Part of the problem, IMO, is that we don’t have a solid societal philosophy behind what our legal system is supposed to accomplish. Do we send folks away to punish them? To convince/teachg them not to transgress in the future? Once someone’s out of prison, past any formal probation period, what does that mean? When it is reasonable to draw on someone’s past behavior to affect how we treat them in the present?
Once Upon a Time, we had this concept of a prisoner “paying his debt to society.” I think a lot of folks still feel that way. But I think there’s also a sense of distrust in the judicial system, a feeling that folks get away with horrible crimes, or get slapped on the wrist and then turned loose on an unsuspecting public.
California’s Three Strike law came into being after 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped and murdered by a repeat offender on parole. I was in Northern California on a job assignment when that happened, not far from that area, and I remember the righteous indignation that the animal who did this had been in prison over and over again and was still free to commit such a crime.
But … but … are we punishing the crime, or the criminal? Is it fair if someone who commits crime X gets charged with a misdemeanor, subject to 30-60 days in the cooler, while someone else who commits exactly the same crime gets charged with a felony and gets 50 years? Is that cruel or unusual?
We’ll see what the Supremes say.
A college friend of our’s prosecuted the first 3-strikes case in Sacramento.
That’s right — I’d forgotten Bonnie was in on that. I don’t recall any discussions I had with her on the subject, though.