DESPITE CONCERN, COURT LETS 'THIRD STRIKE' STAND

WASHINGTON -- Touching on the controversial "three strikes, you're out" laws
that have swept the nation, the Supreme Court on Tuesday let California
impose a 25-year prison sentence on a man who stole a bottle of vitamins
from a supermarket.

Michael Wayne Riggs was caught taking the pills from a store display rack
and putting them in his jacket pocket. If this had been his first offense,
he would have gotten a fine or, under the harshest circumstances, six months
in jail. But because Riggs had a record of drug crimes, robbery and other
felonies, California law required that he spend at least 25 years behind
bars.

Riggs appealed through state courts, and although the California Court of
Appeal described his crime as "a petty theft motivated by homelessness and
hunger," it upheld the stiff sentence. Last year the California Supreme
Court refused to hear the case, leaving Riggs to petition the U.S. Supreme
Court for a hearing.

Had he gotten four justices to agree to hear the dispute, Riggs would have
had another chance to make his case. But Tuesday, the court turned him down.
Only one justice, Stephen G. Breyer, said the appeal should have been heard,
questioning how the state could possibly apply such a penalty "to what is in
essence a petty offense." In an unusual move, three other justices also
worried that such tough mandatory sentences can so disproportionately punish
a repeat criminal that they violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and
unusual punishment.

"While this court has traditionally accorded to state legislatures
considerable (but not unlimited) deference to determine the length of
sentences for crimes ... classifiable as felonies," Justice John Paul
Stevens wrote, "petty theft does not appear to fall into that category."

But as much as Stevens, joined in his statement by Justices David Souter and
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, voiced constitutional worries about California's "three
strikes" law, they did not vote to take up Riggs' case.Rather than joining
Breyer, they said the particulars of Riggs' prior criminal record were
unclear, and said they would rather wait until lower courts had established
a more definitive record on California's three-strikes law.