THREE-STRIKES LAWS MAY NOT MEAN YOU'RE OUT

States Are Rethinking the Mandatory Sentencing Rules for Less-Violent
Offenders.

Stevan Dozier was 25 when he punched a woman in the face to snatch
her purse, another episode in the cash-for-crack crime wave that
plagued America's big cities during the 1980s.

Over the next eight years, he would be arrested three more times for
the same thing. But just before his last conviction, Washington in
1993 became the first state to pass a law requiring criminals with
three serious felony convictions to spend the rest of their lives in
prison. California followed suit the next year, and 24 other states
now have similar laws.

Dozier, who never caused a serious injury or used a weapon,
disappeared behind bars without the possibility of parole -- along
with more than 290 other Washington inmates convicted under the
state's tough three-strikes law.

"I went through a period of depression going into Walla Walla State
Penitentiary," said Dozier, 47.

"I had been to jail before, but I always went in with release dates.
Your vision is, 'I just gotta make it to this date.' But then, there
was no date."

That was before the district attorney's office that sent him to
prison, the conservative talk radio host who coauthored Washington's
law, and the judge who sentenced him all came to agree that despite
the public's demand to keep career criminals behind bars, three
strikes shouldn't always mean never getting out.

In May, Gov. Chris Gregoire signed Dozier's appeal for clemency,
making him the first three-strikes lifer in the nation to be pardoned.

The state's Pardons and Clemency Board in June recommended freeing
Al-Kareem Shadeed, 39, and Michael Bridges, 47, who both had been
sentenced to life without parole in the mid-1990s for stealing wallets.

"My sentence is the same as the Green River killer's. . . . And other
people who have viciously murdered and raped women and children are
getting out of prison while I never will," Shadeed wrote in January
on the liberal Washblog.

Fifteen years after voters and legislatures across the country began
embracing the three-strikes concept, many states apply those laws
more sparingly. Prosecutors and judges often use the discretion
provided them to avoid charging a defendant whose past consists of
minor robberies or assault convictions with a third-strike offense.

Now Washington is taking the extra step of reviewing the cases of
some nonviolent three-strikes prisoners and moving to release those,
like Dozier, who probably would not face such a severe punishment today.

"We're talking about the kinds of offenses that if you were to poll
the average person, they'd say, 'Yeah, it's bad, but is it deserving
of mandatory life in prison without parole?' " said Jennifer Walsh, a
political science professor at Azusa Pacific University who has
studied three-strikes laws across the country.

"I think that's where you start to get some deviance from what was
thought of as being appropriate during the height of the crime wave,
which was 1992-93 for most states, and today with our historic low
crime rates."

In California, where the law is less harsh than in Washington,
two-strikers get a doubled penalty, and three-strikers face 25 years
to life, with parole. More than 40,800 of the state's 170,000 inmates
are behind bars under second-or third-strike provisions, with more
than 8,400 of them sentenced to the full 25 years to life.

In part because of a 1996 California Supreme Court decision that gave
judges leeway to dismiss seemingly unfair third-strike convictions,
the penalty increasingly has been applied to serious, violent offenders.

The same is true in Washington state. About 100 defendants who had
committed no serious violent offense were sentenced to life without
parole from 1994 to 1999, but that number slipped to 39 from 2000 to 2007.

"We have exercised more discretion as we've had more experience with
the law," said Daniel T. Satterberg, King County's prosecuting
attorney, who said he plans to bring a series of clemency petitions
to the governor over the next several months.

"These were not sophisticated, highly planned robberies, nor did they
cause extraordinary harm to anybody. They were street robberies and,
15 years later, I think it is appropriate to review whether their
continued detention is warranted."

Washington was reeling from a series of horrific crimes committed by
repeat offenders when voters passed the three-strikes initiative. Its
early proponents included Helen Harlow of Tacoma -- whose 7-year-old
son had been raped, choked and sexually mutilated in 1989 by a man
who had been assaulting children for 24 years -- and Ida Ballasiotes,
whose daughter was abducted and murdered in 1988 while walking from
her office to her car in downtown Seattle by a man who had been
jailed twice for sexual assaults.

By contrast, Dozier, who worked as a welder and stock clerk after
high school, was mainly grabbing women's purses to support his crack
cocaine habit.

But finding himself in state prison with no prospect of leaving, he
said, marked the beginning of his next life.

"Pain will make a strong man grow. Loss will make you reflect," he
said last month, taking a break in an upscale Seattle coffee shop
from his new job: helping at-risk youths for the Sea of Stars Foundation.

"I picked myself off the ground and I started looking at myself. What
had led me down this road? Drugs were a big contributing factor.
Drugs and laziness. So I said, 'I'm not going to do drugs no more,' " he said.

Dozier, whose wife divorced him after his three-strikes conviction,
joined two drug recovery programs in prison, got a job and started
paying restitution to his victims because it seemed like the right
thing to do, he said. He joined Christian fellowship groups and, in
2000, decided to call his ex-wife, Lillian. He talked her into flying
over to Walla Walla "just to talk."

Gradually, Lillian Dozier told authorities, she became convinced her
former husband really had changed. "He said, 'There is nothing you
can say to me that I haven't already said to myself,' " she recalled
in a letter to the clemency board.

"One day, all of a sudden, the anger was quiet. The hurt had
subsided. . . . I finally came to the realization that I was looking
at a grown-up, mature person," she said.

Stevan Dozier eventually was transferred to a lower-security facility
nearer Seattle, and the couple remarried.

"During the clemency hearing, one of the board members said that was
maybe the best indication. She said this was somebody who had lived
through the changes in Stevan Dozier and, if she's willing to remarry
him, [the board member] was willing to vote for Mr. Dozier's
release," his lawyer, Jeff Ellis, said.

"What was so remarkable about the changes he underwent in prison was
that they really were without any expectation of being released,"
Ellis said. "It was more a matter of, 'I just have to do this for myself.' "

Throughout most of his years in prison, Dozier saw himself as an
example to other young men of what not to do. He missed no
opportunity to tell them so, and he's hoping he'll be able to
continue that work now with the nonprofit organization.

"I always tried to pull others along. I'd tell them, 'This could be
your last time in prison, you're getting out of here, you've got the
world in front of you. Take the courses they're offering you. Get
your GED," he said.

"Some would accept it. They'd go to school, they'd get jobs instead
of laying around in the [prison] yard. They'd get out, and I'd get
letters back. They'd say, 'I'm going to send you some money.' I'd
say, 'No, you send me a picture of you doing good.' And I got a photo
album of pictures."

Defense attorneys in Washington say that the clemency process -- the
only route to freedom for the state's three-strikes inmates -- is
cumbersome and expensive. The state does not provide public defenders
for clemency petitioners.

And defendants in some Washington counties still face life prison
terms for strings of relatively minor crimes, said Christie Hedman,
director of the Washington Defender Assn.

Even those prosecutors who are willing to plea bargain to avoid a
three-strikes conviction use the threat of life behind bars to
extract a longer sentence than what otherwise might be imposed, Hedman said.

"They say, 'Well, we won't charge it, but we'll use it as a
negotiating tool.' "

Dozier said he has no criticism of the authorities who sent him to
prison -- he figures he deserved it and, besides, what's the point of
being mad?

At anybody.

"I try not to have arguments with my wife. No. I do the dishes. I
take the trash out. I open the door when she gets in the car. I take
pride when I do things like that, because my wife waited on me. She
sacrificed for me," he said.

"Sure, we're going to argue," he said. "But I learned a new way to
fight. I say, 'We're going to agree to disagree.' Because I don't
have time for fighting. I fought for my freedom. I fought for my
freedom. I have no animosity left."