Families to Amend California's Three Strikes : Published June, 2010 VICTIMS OF PAIN AND BLIND JUSTICE Fighting California’s Three Strike Law WORDS AND PHOTOS BY ADAM PATTERSON VICE MAGAZINE

In 1997, William Anderson stole a dollar in loose change from a parked car. He was arrested and sentenced under California’s voter-approved “three strikes and you’re out” law. Mr Anderson’s two previous convictions of daylight residential burglary in 1985 now accounted for his first two strikes, allowing his petty theft from the car to trigger the hammer blow—the third strike. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison.

A number of states in the US have the three strikes law, under which criminals who persistently offend are given increasing penalties. Yet in California there remains one glaring difference that many believe is a catalyst for continued injustice. While the first two strikes must be “serious or violent” crimes, the third strike does not. This discrepancy has allowed criminal prosecutors to press for a variety of life-crippling sentences for the most minor of offences.

In California, the original three strikes law (Proposition 184) was passed in 1994, but it was almost overturned in 2004 when the Proposition 66 ballot proposed to amend the law by requiring the third strike to be a violent or serious crime in order to warrant a life sentence. The ballot’s failure to pass could in some way be attributed to the blitz of TV commercials led by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the run up to the ballot, in which he suggested reform would risk turning America’s most fiendish felons back onto the streets.

As it stands, figures released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation show that, as of 2005, 56 percent of all three-striker inmates were convicted on non-serious or non-violent offences.

Earlier this year, I travelled to California to meet a lawyer called Michael Romano, who, alongside fellow attorney Galit Lipa, has established the Criminal Defense Clinic at Stanford University to fight on behalf of the three-strikers. Romano told me: “There wasn’t anybody, no interest groups or lawyers, dedicated to helping these three-strikers, although arguably the injustices in those cases were as bad as anywhere in the [justice] system.”

After more than a year of casework and tracking people down, they had a breakthrough. Romano persuaded the Superior Court of California to consider a habeas corpus appeal for Alex Maese, a Vietnam War vet with post-traumatic stress disorder who was sentenced to life for possession of a cotton wool ball containing 0.029 grams of heroin in 1997. To everyone’s shock, the judge overturned the conviction and ordered Maese to be released with immediate effect in 2008. The lawyers had obtained expert testimony that Maese self-medicated his disorder with heroin.

The impact of the Stanford team has spread through the prison system and the clinic now has thousands of requests for representation. They accept only non-violent cases where minor crimes have been committed in each of the three strikes. The focus is on the third strike discrepancy and the problems it creates. It’s not even about innocence: all their clients are guilty of committing crime, but those misdemeanours should not have cost them their lives.

Recently, more and more former supporters of the legislation have had a change of heart, says Romano. “We have judges calling us and saying, ‘I sentenced some guy to life ten years ago—I think about the poor bastard all the time. Can you do anything about it?’,” he says.

The issue that remains is that most Californians are not aware of the problems the three strike law has caused. Without even considering the prison costs—the incarceration of three-strikers has cost an estimated additional $19.2 billion—the reality is that those caught up in the law are the homeless, the drug-addicted and the mentally ill. These are not people whose convictions get them on the front of a newspaper. I spoke to four former convicts who fell foul of California’s three strike law, each of whom was released from prison following appeals by Romano’s Criminal Defense Clinic.