THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

You sit in criminal courtrooms long enough, you can pick out the types: the
iceberg dude who swaggers to the bar of justice like the urban gunslinger
he fancies himself, the punk prince who won't admit he's in way over his
head, the wild-eyed neophyte who is just beginning to realize that this
isn't a video game simulation.

Then there is the type who is getting on in years, sadder, yes, and maybe
wiser, but wiser too late because here he is, back in a courtroom again,
just as George Rounds was on Thursday, in Department F in the Santa Monica
courthouse, to hear his sentence for the $5 pebble of crack the cops found
in his jeans last year.

The remarkable thing about Department F wasn't defendant George Steven
Rounds, who is a kind of Sad Sack-looking guy, his 55-year-old's belly
beginning to stretch the elastic waistband of the pistachio green pants
that denote a trusty of the Los Angeles County Jail.

The remarkable thing about Department F was who was there to testify that
something is wrong with a law--the three-strikes law--that could send a guy
like George Rounds to prison until he was fourscore years old.

In one row sat five of the jurors who had convicted him of drug possession:
Salvador Escalante, Juror No. 7, who used a vacation day from the Redondo
Beach parks department to be here, Chris Nevil, Juror No. 11, Connie Price,
Juror No. 10, Roxanne Hernandez, Juror No. 6--and Joanna Sucherman, Juror
No. 5.

While this was far from Rounds' first trial, it was Sucherman's. All 12
jurors were so distressed at having to drop what they rightly suspected was
the third-strike hammer that after the guilty verdict, their foreman read a
statement.

"Every single juror in that room," said Sucherman, "was sick to death. I
asked if we could testify that that isn't what we wanted."

Knowing only faces and juror numbers, Sucherman had tracked down six
jurors. For example, on the sole facts that Juror No. 6 was a pretty,
freckled blond working at Herbalife, Sucherman located Roxanne Hernandez.
The other six she never found. (The foreman, who had to be away, sent a
letter for Thursday's sentencing.)

Except for Escalante, who voted in 1994 against the three-strikes
initiative that mandates 25-to-life sentences for career criminals, and
Sucherman, who didn't vote at all, most had supported the law they were now
telling Judge Rex Minter was unfair. Now they would see what happens when
you vote for one thing and find you got something else altogether: the Law
of Unintended Consequences.

George Rounds is one of those guys who gets a few shots at the brass ring
and never quite manages to grab hold. There was his B.A. in economics from
the University of Washington, and before that, three years in Vietnam,
where he acquired an appetite for drugs that he would never quite shake.

In 1980, he worked for a real estate agent--and sneaked into clients'
houses to steal valuables for drug money. Five counts of burglary, guilty.
In 1989, it was a theft, drug and gun incident, and Rounds wound up shot in
the face. Guilty, 13 years in prison, and a torn-up face for a lifetime.

When the cops found the crack on him last June, he was still on parole, at
a sober-living home for six months, going to 12-step meetings daily, and
selling computers. That day, Rounds had heard that his linchpin, his
cherished drug counselor, was dying. He went out, got high, and got busted.

First, Rounds' co-workers, men who had had their own drug demons, asked for
leniency. The five jurors spoke as one against a sentence way out of kilter
with what they had convicted him of.

Then, Minter ruled. Rounds' case "falls outside the spirit of the
three-strikes law," and he would not count seven old crimes as "strikes."
Sucherman squeezed Escalante's hand as the man who came close to looking at
prison walls until turned 80 was sentenced to eight years, with credit for
two served.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ellen St. John, who had called Rounds "a poster boy for
three strikes," was on her feet, protesting "the abuse of discretion" that
her office would "in all likelihood appeal."

And the jurors, wound so tight all morning, uncoiled outside, talking all
at once. "That," said Sucherman, "was justice. It's long but--"

"But not life," said Hernandez.

Across the state are murmurs of dissatisfaction with three strikes. A UC
study found that the plunge in crime has almost nothing to do with three
strikes. An initiative is in the works to require that the third strike be
a serious or violent crime--not a nugget of crack.

The day before Rounds went to Department F, a man facing his third
strike--for a gun violation, a handful of marijuana and a pinch of
speed--killed himself in Sacramento. His first strikes were for armed
robbery, in Michigan, 23 years ago.

Patt Morrison's column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is
patt.morrison@latimes.com