A MOVEMENT BUILDS AGAINST 'THREE STRIKES' LAW

Tough Sentencing Rules May Face Challenge on Calif. Ballot; Nonviolent
Crimes Bring Long Terms

LOS ANGELES - In a prayer house on the hard side of this city, Geri Silva
delivers the same plea to the same crowd one night every week. Keep
working, keep hoping, she tells a few dozen families with relatives in jail
for decades or life, and maybe someday the nation's toughest sentencing
rules for criminals will be eased or overturned.

Silva leads a community group that is part of a movement spreading across
California to fight the state's unsparing "three strikes" law. It doubles
minimum prison terms for second-time felons and requires 25 years to life
for third-time felons, even if they commit nonviolent crimes such as theft.
Protesters are rallying against the law at courthouses, a campaign is
brewing to persuade voters to scale it back this year, and a few signs of
retreat are apparent in the state legislature. But Silva has no illusions
about the task ahead.

"This is an uphill struggle," she said. "There's not much outrage. People
have really accepted this."

When it was approved almost six years ago, after public fury over the
murder of a 12-year-old girl by a paroled felon, California's three-strikes
law touched such a nerve in the national consciousness that more than two
dozen other states took the cue and adopted similar measures. Today, many
of those laws are seldom used because they are narrowly drawn. But
California is still invoking the law with a vengeance, despite growing
debate on whether it's too extreme.

Even with crime declining and its economy surging, the Golden State is in a
law-and-order mood as it prepares to play a starring role in another
national election season. And nothing illustrates that point more than the
loud but losing battle to rein in or throw out its three-strikes law.

"It's raising a lot of questions," said Peter Greenwood, a senior analyst
on criminal justice for the Rand Institute, which is studying the law. "But
almost everyone seems afraid to touch it."

Few doubt the law's impact. At last count, nearly 50,000 criminals have
received severe sentences under the statute. They are the fastest-growing
group in California's jammed prisons, already nearly one-fourth of the
population behind bars, and their rising numbers could soon have serious
implications for state spending.

The law also has given prosecutors enormous--some say too much--new power.
Now they can lock away not just violent criminals for a long time, which
they are doing more than ever through the law, but also felons whose second
or third offenses would otherwise have kept them in prison for only a few
years, if at all.

In fact, state statistics show that most of the time when felons in
California get punished with lengthy imprisonment for second or third
strikes, it's for committing nonviolent property or drug crimes.

Around California, criminals have received a third strike for shoplifting a
carton of cigarettes or stealing a pizza. All received minimum 25-year
prison sentences because of their records. At times, third-strike crimes
have been committed years after a felon's last offense. In one instance in
Los Angeles, a homeless man who broke into a church in search of food
received a third-strike sentence even though his last offense, a robbery,
took place a decade earlier and he also knew the church's pastor.

Those cases are giving momentum to campaigns afoot in the state either to
exempt nonviolent offenses from the law or to make the third-strike
penalties for them less punitive.

"It's just not fair," said Leon Shirley, whose 46-year-old younger brother
recently began serving a mandatory three-strikes sentence for possession of
a pocketful of crack. "I'm not making excuses for my brother's behavior or
trying to make him look good--he's a drug addict. But he had already done
time for his other crimes, 11 years, and he wasn't out there on the street
robbing again. I feel like now he's just getting punished all over again
for his past. What he needs is treatment, not 25 more years in jail."

Shirley is a regular at the weekly meetings that a group called Families to
Amend California's Three Strikes holds in South Central Los Angeles. Every
month, it is staging demonstrations at courts around Los Angeles County. It
also is taking to the streets to promote a statewide petition drive to get
an initiative on the ballot in November that would restrict three-strikes
sentences to violent crimes. Other chapters of the group that have formed
around the state recently are embarking on the same plan of attack against
the law.

Civil liberties groups are joining the cause, as are public defenders and
some criminology professors who say the measure is most affecting convicted
felons in middle age and long past their criminal prime. Even the father of
young Polly Klaas, whose abduction and murder in 1993 in Petaluma, Calif.,
provoked a crusade to create the three-strikes law, has publicly expressed
strong doubts about how the law is being used.

But with all serious forms of crime around the state continuing to fall,
and some analysts crediting the law for at least some of the decline, many
prosecutors and lawmakers in California are reluctant to tinker with the
law. The California District Attorneys Association contends that for the
most part, three-strikes penalties are working exactly as it had hoped:
ridding the streets of career criminals most likely to pose a threat to
society, and deterring others from committing serious offenses.

"There's no need for any of these alleged fixes," said Larry Brown, the
executive director of the district attorneys association.

In Los Angeles, prosecutors say it is not unusual anymore to hear felons
tell them they are moving out of the state because they fear getting a
second or third strike for a nonviolent offense. Some officials even
believe that the law is creating more police chases on the city's maze of
freeways because criminals, who know that getting caught with a stolen car
could result in a minimum 25 years in prison, are desperate to escape.

Every proposal introduced in the state legislature to limit the use of
three-strikes sentences has been blocked. The past two years, lawmakers
have passed bills authorizing studies of the law, but each one has been
vetoed, first by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, then by his newly elected
successor, Democrat Gray Davis.

Davis, who is riding high in public opinion polls, plans to hire more
parole agents to help criminals with two strikes avoid committing a third,
but he has shown no interest in changing any part of the law.

"Three strikes works," said Michael Bustamante, a spokesman for the
governor. "He fully supports it."

So far, only California's Supreme Court has taken steps to limit three
strikes, by banning some juvenile crimes such as robbery from an adult
criminal's tally and by giving judges more flexibility in sentencing.

California's law has sent far more criminals back to prison than similar
measures in other states because it makes far more felonies subject to its
tough prison terms. And in March, that list might get longer because of an
initiative on the state ballot that will ask voters to make even more
criminal offenses, for adults and juveniles, subject to longer mandatory
minimum prison sentences.

Silva's grass-roots group is sending motorcades through poor communities in
Los Angeles and urging voters to oppose that measure, too. "We're not
solving a problem," she said. "We're just feeding the prison industry on
one end, and ripping families and poor communities apart on the other end."

But prosecutors insist that they are careful to use discretion when
deciding whether to invoke a third-strike prison sentence, especially for a
nonviolent offense. Although they do not account for a majority of the
sentences, violent offenses are a common reason for receiving a third
strike, state records show. Cases involving felonies as minor as theft are
rare, prosecutors say, and on close inspection even cracking down on some
of them makes sense.

In a three-strikes case involving a shoplifted bottle of vitamins, the
criminal had eight prior convictions, including four for robbery. And in
January, a 30-year-old man in central California with two prior convictions
for armed robbery was prosecuted on bigamy charges under the state's
three-strikes law. Ordinarily, that offense would bring at most a few years
in prison. Now, he could be behind bars for decades.

Don Gallian, an assistant district attorney in Tulare County who prosecuted
the case, said he did not think twice about invoking three-strikes
penalties against the man.

"What we're focusing on are criminals who show up here time and time again,
and he's one of them," Gallian said. "He's a violent, dangerous criminal. I
know people keep criticizing three strikes, but you know, income tax
evasion is a nonviolent offense, too. And no one complained back when the
government used it to finally put Al Capone away for good."