Three-Strikes Law in San Diego

The late 1980s and early 1990s brought a dramatic increase in crimes of all types in California, including San Diego and the surrounding communities. Not only did crime in general increase, but the Los Angeles riots of 1992 ignited a desire in the population to impose harsher and more permanent sentences to habitual criminals. As lovers of baseball, Americans naturally gravitated toward a punitive measure based on striking out. If you commit three or more felonies, you'll be locked away for good. Three-strikes laws started showing up in states all across the U.S.. The most notorious, however, was in California.

In California, the proposition system allows the enactment of laws through direct democracy. Proposition 184, known as the Three Strikes Initiative, was on the ballot during the mid-term elections of 1994. It was meant to significantly strengthen the three-strikes law that had already passed in the California legislature earlier in the year. On November 8th, 72 percent of voters approved of the proposition. The success of the measure is often attributed to a few high-class cases involving repeat offenders that occurred in the preceding years, including the murders of Poly Class and Kimber Reynolds.

Even though California is not the only, nor the first, state with a three-strikes law, it does have the toughest. Habitual criminals can be locked away for 25 years to life for non-serious and non-violent offenses on their third strike; most other states demand a serious or violent crime for third-strike life sentences. In 1996, district attorneys from counties all across the state imposed life sentences in more than 1,700 cases as a result of the three-strikes legislation. These numbers dropped significantly in the following 15 years. There are currently about 200 three-strike life sentence cases per year in California.

Three-strikes laws have come under a lot of criticism in judicial and academic circles. Relatively minor offenses can often result in life sentences for repeat criminals in many cases. For example, Leandro Andrade is serving a 50-to-life-sentence for shoplifting after prosecutors elevated the offense to a felony according to three-strikes provisions. Andrade appealed his case all the way to the supreme court based on the argument that his sentence violated cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th amendment. The SCOTUS majority, however, did not find that his sentence was cruel and unusual under the framework of California law.