From: "Sam H. Clauder II" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: "Yes On 66" Committee [NOTE: This article preview does not include the photos in the published copy.]
LOS ANGELES TIMES MAGAZINE Los Angeles, California Sunday, September 19, 2004 COVER STORY They Changed Their Minds on Three Strikes. Can They Change the Voters'? <http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-threestrikes38sep19,1,7210457.story?coll=la-home-magazine>http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-threestrikes38sep19,1,7210457.story?coll=la-home-magazine [see the complete story by clicking on the link above] Ten years ago, these men wanted to see three strikes become the law in California. Now they're leading the fight to reform it. By Joe Domanick, Joe Domanick last wrote for the magazine about Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton. He is a Senior Fellow at USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism, and the author of "Cruel Justice." [clip] This year's attempt to reform the three-strikes law on its 10th anniversary also is rife with pain and loss and, most of all, a change of heart. Two self-described ragtag volunteer activists worked for years in anonymity to reform it. Polly Klaas' grandfather has become its powerful advocate. A wealthy Sacramento insurance broker with a son in prison stepped in to personally bankroll it. All four supported the original three-strikes law. All four have changed their minds. [clip] Newsweek has called California's law "the toughest" in the nation. U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens reacted to such sentences by declaring California "the only state in [the union] in which a misdemeanor could receive such a severe sentence." California's three-strikes law, in fact, is the only one of 26 three-strikes states that doesn't require a violent crime conviction to trigger a third strike. The state's 7,400 third-strikers are more than half the total number of those imprisoned for third strikes in the U.S. Of those Californians, 57% are now serving sentences based on a nonviolent third crime among them 357 for petty theft and 678 for drug possession. About 35,000 other prisoners have had their sentences doubled for second strikes under another provision of the law. Getting Proposition 66 on the ballot has been a great victory for Clauder and other reformers the only one that California's three-strikes opponents have had in a long, frustrating decade of failed attempts. There's no guarantee that the initiative will pass: Virtually the entire criminal justice system in California is opposing Proposition 66, and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer have both signed the official ballot argument against it. Nevertheless, there are signs that this year could be different. In a Field Poll conducted last month, 69% of likely voters supported Proposition 66, including 60% of Republicans and 59% of conservatives, and 78% said that Schwarzenegger and Lockyer's opposition would not affect their vote. [clip] In the fall of 1999, Clauder read a three-strikes commentary in the Los Angeles Times written by Polly Klaas' grandfather, Joe Klaas. Clauder got in touch with Klaas, a now-retired 84-year-old resident of Pebble Beach, and he agreed to become the reform effort's public face and chief spokesman. [clip] It might seem incongruous that a man who had lost his granddaughter to a demented murderer would become an implacable foe of three strikes. But only if you'd never met Joe Klaas, an idealist from a different time. At the outbreak of World War II in Europe, he quit the University of Washington, joined England's Royal Air Force and fought as a Spitfire pilot. After joining the U.S. forces, he was shot down over North Africa and spent the rest of the war as a POW, seeing, he says, "Allied prisoners gunned down not 50 feet" from him. But there was more than that. For many years he had volunteered at San Quentin, Soledad and Vacaville prisons to coordinate 12-step recovery programs for inmates. (He was forced to stop because of the warped convict logic that held Polly responsible for the passage of three strikes. If he continued volunteering, prison officials told him, he'd be a marked man.) [clip] In any case, given the numerous failed legislative attempts to reform mandatory minimum sentences such as three strikes in California or the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, Clauder probably has it right: "You can't rely on politicians to correct the law. You have to correct it by initiative. Only then will policy follow." "The phone is ringing off the wall," Clauder says, and he is "breathing fire," fielding calls from people who, like him, are unhappy that the final version of Proposition 66 doesn't apply retroactively to second-strikers. He's still actively supporting the proposition, but he has now formed his own organization, "Yes on 66." Its major mission will be to influence the debate so that when Proposition 66 is adjudicated should it pass a judge might rule that including second-strikers was the voters' intent. [clip] As for the 57% of prisoners whose third strike was for a nonviolent crime, they wait for the voters of California to decide whether or not they'll be spending the rest of their lives in prison. [see the complete story by clicking on the link below] <http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-threestrikes38sep19,1,7210457.story?coll=la-home-magazine>http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-threestrikes38sep19,1,7210457.story?coll=la-home-magazine ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. 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