CALIFORNIA'S THREE-STRIKES LAW SURVIVES SUPREME COURT REVIEW

The Supreme Court left intact California's three-strikes law, the nation's
toughest on repeat offenders, even though four of the nine justices voiced
concerns Tuesday about its constitutionality.

The justices rejected the appeal of a man sentenced to 25 years to life in
prison after he stole a bottle of vitamins from a supermarket, a crime one
California court called "a petty theft motivated by homelessness and
hunger."

Nine-time loser Michael Riggs, in an appeal he wrote himself, had attacked
the three-strikes law as cruel and unusual punishment.

In other matters Tuesday, the court:

Let Florida continue using the electric chair as the sole means of imposing
the death penalty, rejecting a condemned man's contention that
electrocution is a cruel and outmoded method of capital punishment.

Refused to revive a 1994 defamation lawsuit that Operation Rescue and three
of its leaders filed against Sen. Edward Kennedy for linking the
anti-abortion group to murder and other violence. The justices let stand
rulings that immunized Kennedy (D-Mass.) and later the federal government,
from being sued over his comments.

In the California three-strikes case, only Justice Stephen Breyer voted to
hear Riggs' appeal. Four votes are needed to grant such full review. Three
other justices, however, said his case raised "obviously substantial"
issues that first should be considered by lower courts.

About half the states adopted three-strikes this decade but those laws
generally have not been invoked often. That's the case in Wisconsin.

California has been the major exception. The state has used its 1994 law to
put away more than 40,000 people for second and third strikes a quarter of
the state's prison population. About 4,400 of them were sentenced to 25
years to life.

Another exception is Georgia, which has sentenced nearly 2,000 people under
its three-strikes law.

Washington state was the first to enact such a law, in 1993, and has used
it to imprison about 120 people for life without chance of parole.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for himself and Justices David Souter
and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, noted that California "appears to be the only
state in which a misdemeanor could receive such a severe sentence."

But Stevens said other courts should determine whether California's law
yields sentences that are so "grossly disproportionate" as to be
unconstitutional.

"It is prudent . . . for this court to await review by other courts," he said.

Riggs was convicted of shoplifting a bottle of vitamins in 1995 from an
Albertson's Store in Banning, a Los Angeles suburb. When arrested, he had a
hypodermic syringe hidden in one of his socks.

He previously had been convicted eight times four non-violent crimes and
four robberies.

"In this particular case, the sentence was not cruel and unusual
punishment," state Deputy Attorney General Craig Nelson said in an
interview. "But if the justices were inclined to believe it might have
been, they were right to let it percolate in the lower courts."

In 1980, the court upheld the life sentence of a Texas man whose three
convictions were for credit card fraud worth $80, forging a $28 check and
falsely obtaining $120. That inmate was eligible for parole after serving
12 years.

The court in 1983 overturned a South Dakota man's life sentence for six
non-violent crimes, but his sentence carried no chance of parole.

And in 1991, the court upheld a life sentence without possibility of parole
for a Michigan man convicted of possessing a small amount of cocaine. The
court ruled then that the Constitution bars only those sentences that are
"grossly disproportionate" to the crime.