Three Strikes 25 to life…Is this what the voters had in mind?

Lisa Connelly is currently serving 25 year to life under California’s Three Strikes Law. She was sentenced in June 2000 for simple drug possession and receiving stolen property. In addition to a 25 year to life sentence, she was ordered to pay restitution of $10,000 dollars. Her Co- defendant David Jones pled no contest to one count of possession of stolen property in exchange for a promised probationary sentence in return for turning Lisa in, his burglary count; prior strikes of child molestation were dismissed as part of his plea agreement, as a result of his cooperation with parole officer Peter DeVires . Jones was ultimately placed on probation and sent to a drug program. He has since re- committed additional sex crimes of attempted rape, sodomy and oral copulation and is registered as a sex offender in California. His whereabouts are unknown and may have subsequently relocated. While Lisa has languished in prison for almost 10 years for nothing more than violating parole. There are no good time credits under this law. She will not be eligible for parole until the year 2025.It cost $48,536.00 each year to house her. Her prior non-violent convictions all came out of one case.Co-defendant David Jones was exactly the type of criminal this law was intended for, yet because of Parole officer Peter DeVires desire to see Lisa Connelly returned to prison, he was willing to bargain with a sexual predator to win the conviction of a drug user whose convictions were both considered “wobbler crimes”. Is this what the voters had in mind when we passed the Three Strikes Law?

How Long is Enough?

The public reacting to crime in the eighties passed sweeping new laws in keen jerk reaction to crime. This was fueled by special interest groups with ads that placed our children as the targets of crime. It was an easy sell! Tell the public your children are at risk and the public will scream out for justice! The war on drugs used these tactics well and still do. So we went after drug users with laws that would earn a life sentence for simple possession. California’s Three Strikes Law was the toughest! Proof of this are in the numbers incarcerated. Of all the Three Strikes States, California incarcerates 4 times as many inmates as all Three Strikes states combined! Drug users were hit hard. 690 people are serving life sentences for simple drug possession. Most only had to have a prior of burglary sometime in their past. Most were priors decades old and years before Three Strikes was enacted. Many were juveniles 16-17 years of age and DA’s used three strikes that came out of one case to get these convictions. The cost to taxpayers could not be imagined. Correction spending leaped from 400 million dollars in 1980 to 10.6 billion today. Governors and legislators along with DA’s, law enforcement and prison guards saw this as a guaranteed employment act! This would keep the budgets bloated and earn high praise from the public. With the cost rising, the money to sustain this prison system had to come from somewhere? So under the guise of public safety, the money was sucked from education and welfare, from higher tuition for college students and is served on a silver plate to law enforcement and corrections. But are we any safer? Do prison and long sentences give the public a good return on our dollars spent? The public deserves to know the answers to these questions and many are beginning to ask? How long is long enough?                     

A failure of the legislature                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    In Ewing and Andrade, the Supreme Court declined to invoke the Cruel and Unusual

Punishment Clause to invalidate two inmates’ exceptionally long three-strike terms,

thus further weakening the Eighth Amendment as a check on uniquely harsh

punishments. Justice O’Connor, in her plurality opinion in Ewing, argued that critics

of three strikes laws should look to the legislature, rather than to the courts, for

redress. O’Connor wrote: “criticism [of California’s three strikes law] is

appropriately directed at the legislature, which has primary responsibility for making

the difficult policy choices that underlie any criminal sentencing scheme. We do not

sit as a ‘superlegislature’ to second-guess these policy choices.”