Friday, February 22, 2002
Page 7
AFFAIRS OF STATE (Column)
California’s Three-Strikes Law Is Perfectly Fair
By DAVID KLINE
Does a man deserve life imprisonment for stealing a few videotapes? Not if it’s his first offense. But what about when it’s just the latest exploit in a life of crime that started 23 years ago and shows no signs of stopping?
California voters answered this question in 1994 when they approved the three-strikes initiative. They correctly decided that career criminals should be locked up for life, and that three felony convictions are enough to determine that a person has no regard for the law.
The author of the three-strikes statute, former Assemblyman and now Secretary of State Bill Jones, puts it succinctly: “There is no reason to wait for another woman to be raped or another child to be molested before taking criminals with a history of serious and violent crime off the streets.”
Unfortunately, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals doesn’t agree. On Feb. 14, the judges—appointees of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—ruled that California’s three-strikes law leads to “cruel and unusual punishment” when the third felony is a nonviolent crime like petty theft. The judges ordered a lower court to resentence two career criminals: Earnest Bray Jr. and Richard Napoleon Brown.
“We conclude that sentences of 25 years to life for Bray’s and Brown’s petty theft offenses violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment,” said the opinion written by Judge Marsha Berzon, a Clinton appointee. “... Bray and Brown’s sentences of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 25 years are grossly disproportionate to their respective crimes ...”
Unless the ruling is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, hundreds of other three-strikes criminals will be able to cite it as precedent when appealing their own well-deserved sentences.
Rather than going through the legal arguments or hypothesizing about how many more people will become victims if this ruling stands, it might be instructive to look at how Bray and Brown got in this jam in the first place.
Bray’s third strike was for attempting to steal three videotapes from a store in Long Beach in 1994. He activated the store’s security system, was detained by store employees and was arrested by the police.
His earlier crimes are a bit more exciting—and violent. In 1980, he was convicted of three separate counts of robbery, including a 1979 incident in which he and an accomplice robbed a woman at gunpoint, with the accomplice pointing a gun at the victim’s head and firing shots as the two fled the scene. Another time, Bray helped as co-conspirators hit and kicked a victim in the face while stealing his watch and money. Bray was convicted of another robbery in 1987.
Those are just the crimes that were described to the jury. He also has been convicted of resisting arrest and trespass in 1979, possession of a dangerous weapon in 1985, being under the influence of a controlled substance in 1991 and petty theft in 1995—while he was out on bail for another arrest.
Brown, too, has proven that he’s determined to be a criminal. His third strike was for stealing a car alarm worth $25 in 1995. His 13 prior convictions include five serious or violent felonies dating back to 1971. Along with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, he has been convicted of drunken driving, vehicle theft, distributing hypodermic needles, battery and possession of drugs.
Keep in mind that these are just the convictions. Who knows how many more crimes Bray and Brown committed without getting caught?
These pieces of work deserve life behind bars—and then some.
— Capitol News Service
Copyright 2002, Metropolitan News Company