A STRIKING DIFFERENCE

Laws sometimes have unintended consequences. That could be the case with
the "threestrikes" law, which went into effect in March 1994 in
California. The law mandates that for someone with two prior violent felony
convictions a third felony convictionviolent or nonviolentbrings a
mandatory sentence of 25 years to life.

According to research by Lt. Michael J. Stedman, a Fullerton police
officer, since 1994 the deaths of six California police officers have been
tied to the threestikes law.

As the Register news article Monday said, "Between the passage of three
strikes and Dec. 31, 1996 ... an average of seven officers a year were
killed in assaults. Four of the suspects in those killings were
threestrikes candidates. Two others thought they were eligible for a third
strike, even though they were not."

"I see this as a potential unintended consequence of the threestrikes
law," Lt. Stedman told us. "My evidence is pretty small, but it does
corroborate the anecdotal evidence that's been out there for several years"
among police officers. And the increase in homicides of officers occurred
even as violent crime was dropping overall in California.

That's the same conclusion drawn by Gilbert Geis, a professor emeritus of
criminology at the University of California, Irvine. "The generalization
I'd make," he told us, "is that the threestrikes law has a lot of
fallouts. You've got a lot more court trials because people won't plead. It
gives the prosecutor a lot more power. Threatened with 25 years to life, a
defendant is going to cut any deal with the prosecutor. And if someone is
going to face a long sentence for, say, burglary, sure he'll shoot.

Mr. Geis made a comparison with the Lindbergh Law, passed after aviation
pioneer Charles Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped and murdered in 1932. The
law made kidnapping a capital crime, even if the victim was not harmed. The
result was that, faced with the death penalty no matter what, kidnappers
started killing more victims. The law later was changed to require the
death penalty only if the victim was murdered.

Mr. Geis favors returning more discretion to judges.

Lt. Stedman favors a law requiring twostrikes convicts to register with
authorities, indicating where they live. But this is too great an intrusion
into privacy for people who have paid their debt to society and are no
longer in jail or on probation.

A better approach is to revise the threestrikes law, for which five
versions were proposed initially. Unfortunately, the most draconian
version, allowing the third strike to be any kind of a felonyeven a
nonviolent onebecame law.

This year, Senate Bill 1317, which would require the third felony be a
violent one, was introduced but failed to pass its first vote. Under SB
1317, for example, someone who gets two felony convictions for brawls, then
gets a third arrest for check forging, shouldn't automatically be sent to
jail for life.

This seems sensible to us; SB 1317 should be reconsidered, and passed.