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Clash of the featherweights
George W. Bush and Al Gore both support contradictory policies on China and Cuba. Neither can explain why.
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"It's devastating," said Berthena McFarland, from West Covina. "That's my only son. He was a productive citizen; he was doing so good. To go back and dig up stuff from 17 years ago and use it against him like that -- it just isn't right."

Growing up in Los Angeles, Fontenot got mixed up with some rough kids, and he made more than his share of youthful mistakes. His role in a robbery landed him in the California Youth Authority. A purse snatching brought him another felony and more juvenile jail time.

Then, his parents said, he grew up.

At 39, he was a partner in a successful limousine company and was married with three kids. But he ended up with a life sentence five years ago because he was in a car with someone who had an unlicensed gun, McFarland said.

"When you have two very old prior felonies and then years later you suddenly go to prison for life, that's sorely disproportionate to the offense," Baugh said. "To have an effective justice system it not only has to be tough but it has to be fair."

An arguably more tragic case generated national publicity in November. A small-time hood and his girlfriend killed themselves after being busted in Sacramento County for pot and methamphetamine possession. Just a day before their double suicide, the Sacramento district attorney's office notified Steven Davis it had discovered two prior felonies on his record for armed robbery, dating back more than 20 years in Maryland. Instead of 120 days in jail in exchange for a guilty plea, as he had been promised, Davis was suddenly facing life without parole under three strikes.

If his last crimes had been committed in San Francisco, where the district attorney rarely invokes three strikes unless there is a violent felony, Davis would not have had to fear 25 years to life. Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully, who ran on an ultratough anti-crime platform, interprets the law much more strictly. That sharp disparity in how the law is administered from county to county also has encouraged demands for change.

But so far the constituency to alter the law remains small.

"The interest lies mostly with the families that are looking at the short end of the stick when it comes to three strikes," Baugh conceded. "But that doesn't mean we still don't have an obligation to look at it."

Political support may be more diverse than Baugh believes, however. Calls for change have come from a variety of political and law enforcement sources, with Vice President Al Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, endorsing a study of problems with three-strikes laws across the nation.

"We ought to review the nature of the crimes that are included in the calculation of this 'three strikes and you're out' provision," Gore said earlier this year at a debate in Harlem, N.Y.

Gore seemed to be playing to the African-American community, where concerns about unfair sentencing are the strongest. But even once staunch advocates of the law are now asking whether things have gone too far.

The grandfather of Polly Klaas, the little girl whose 1993 abduction and murder in California helped spark a nationwide wave of three-strikes laws, has raised many of the same questions and has spoken out across the state.

"To take someone who has committed a nonviolent crime and send them to prison for 25 years to life is unconscionable," the 80-year-old Klaas said last week in Sacramento. "To have [Polly's] name used to perpetuate this fraud on the people of California, I think, is a disgrace."

Increasingly, people directly involved in the administration of the law are speaking out in agreement.

Sacramento Police Chief Arturo Venegas, a strong supporter of the three-strikes concept, says it's time to modify how the law is applied. "To say the solution to crime is three strikes is ludicrous, just as it would be to say community policing has been the solution to crime," Venegas said. "It has helped in the sense that we've put away some criminals who really needed to be put away a long time."

Venegas has a direct tie to one case that helped inspire the law -- the 1992 slaying of 18-year-old Kimber Reynolds by a parolee, a case that led Reynolds' father, Mike, to author the ballot initiative.

"I was in Fresno when the Reynolds girl was killed," Venegas said. "I was deputy chief of detectives in charge of the SWAT team that confronted and apprehended and got into a shootout with Mike Reynolds' daughter's killer.

"And I have fought the Department of Corrections' battle here on holding parolees and habitual criminal offenders accountable. That's been part of my career and part of my life.

"On the other hand, the courts need some latitude in sentencing. A person arrested for petty theft of 15 cents -- I'm not sure that's in the best interest to have that person go away for life."

But the efforts to change California's law may fall victim to political reality in a state where crime has dropped since the implementation of the law. And many credit tougher sentencing for that drop.

Gov. Gray Davis, a longtime supporter of the three-strikes law, has made it plain he has little interest in seeing the law changed. "As long as you have me, you have a governor who believes in and supports three strikes," Davis told a group of advocates of tough sentencing at a dinner in Sacramento recently.

And Davis has a large base of supporters of that stance, including the politically powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union that represents the state's prison guards. The union gave Davis $2 million for his successful 1998 gubernatorial campaign. Three strikes has been good to the union, ensuring a burgeoning prison population and, critics say, a long-term economic base for its members.

But a more important factor may simply be the reality of a state with 33 million people, most of whom "could care less" about the state's 160,000 prison inmates, according to longtime bail bondsman and former bounty hunter Leonard Padilla.

Padilla, who has spoken to the anti-three-strikes groups about their efforts, has taken pains to point out that their message simply isn't interesting to anyone except the relatives and friends of three-strikes inmates.

A better approach, he believes, is to push for change based on what the law is costing the state. Some people apparently are beginning to listen to that advice. The ballot initiative campaign, for instance, is trying to win approval by asserting that the state could save at least $15 million annually by softening the law.

"I would say 99 percent of the people that I've talked to have pretty much said that they agree with the law, except that it should be for violent crimes," said Wilcox, the Northern California juror who refused to levy a third-strike conviction. "And that is what they thought it was when they voted for it.

"The law as it is currently being used is costing us a fortune," Wilcox added. But in the end his objection is more basic. "To me, it's a moral issue. This type of a punishment does not go along with the offense. It just doesn't."
salon.com | May 9, 2000

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