After the media spotlight shined on the circumstances of Rachel Hoffman’s death, one of the officers involved was fired, but he quickly won reinstatement and was transferred to another job in the department. A year after the murder, Florida passed legislation dubbed “Rachel’s Law.” Billed as an important edict, it would, the public was told, tighten rules on police use of confidential informants. New rules required police to provide special training for officers handling informants and decreed that such informants be instructed that their sentences wouldn’t necessarily be reduced in exchange for their work. The law also spelled out that informants had the right to request a lawyer (a right they already held).3 Despite the new language, future suspects could still be caught in the same trap that killed Hoffman. Drug-war diehards continued to control the ground.4
6
Three Strikes and You’re Out
The law ought to impose no other penalties but such as are absolutely and evidently necessary.
In November 2012 more than 60 percent of California voters passed Proposition 36, ending eighteen years of a three-strikes experiment gone wrong. The new measure retained the concept of extending sentences for repeat offenders, particularly those facing a third conviction, but it established grounds for people serving time for nonserious and nonviolent crimes to ask for shorter prison sentences.1 Under the new law’s reforms, approximately twenty-eight hundred inmates were eligible to file for sentence review, and judges were obliged to reduce sentences unless doing so would endanger the public.
By early 2013 judges across the state were examining petitions. On February 11, 2013, for example, Los Angeles County judge William C. Ryan reduced sentences for five people convicted of relatively minor crimes. Among them was Richard Packard, eighty-one, who’d already served seventeen years for stealing forty-five packs of cigarettes from a supermarket, and Robert Benavidez, seventy-four, who’d served nearly sixteen years for possessing a balloon containing ten dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin.2 California’s three-strikes rulings—with their catchy, instantly understandable slogan that evoked the all-American pastime, hot dogs, and Babe Ruth—had left a lengthy trail of human detritus.
The tale of Gregory Taylor probably motivated many voters who approved Proposition 36. Modern America’s own Jean Valjean, Taylor was locked up for thirteen years after two security guards caught him trying to lift out the screen on the door to a Los Angeles church pantry in 1997. Homeless and hungry, he was a frequent guest at the pantry, but the doors wouldn’t open for another hour. Had the guards consulted the priest who operated the facility, the Reverend Allan McCoy—a kindhearted man not unlike Victor Hugo’s Bishop Myriel—he’d have informed them that Taylor was a longtime friend who sometimes slept in the church and that he would take care of it. But instead the guards turned Taylor over to local police.3
Taylor was one of many thousands of troubled souls trudging up and down Los Angeles’s skid row in a journey to nowhere. Like so many of them, he had a history of mental illness and a drug addiction he’d picked up trying to self-medicate out on the street. His public defender argued unsuccessfully that what transpired that morning at the church property involved neither a crime nor a victim, but if a crime existed, it was trespassing, not burglary. Father McCoy spoke on the defendant’s behalf, but Taylor was convicted and sentenced under the three-strikes law.
Sentenced to twenty-five years to life, Taylor had at least twelve more years to serve in 2010 when two Stanford law students discovered an error in Superior Court Judge James Dunn’s instructions to the jury. Still, trying to free Taylor was tough sledding. The state fought to keep him, but eventually the Los Angeles district attorney stopped contesting the appeal, and Taylor won his freedom.
Taylor was forty-eight when he was freed at last by a judge who declared that his deprived, difficult boyhood; mental health problems; and mild personality placed him “outside the spirit of the three strikes law.”4 Taylor’s previous two strikes had been earned more than a decade before the fateful morning he tried to pry open the screen. They were for purse snatching and an unarmed, failed street robbery. While Gregory Taylor was locked up, his brother, Michael Taylor, motivated by Gregory’s travails, had become the manager of a food pantry in Pomona, California, and Gregory’s plan when he finally gained release was to help feed hungry folks.
After Taylor won his freedom the original prosecutor, Dale Cutler, said he still believed that “the facts strongly suggest that the motivation wasn’t for food” and that the defendant had been hoping to steal money or valuables, possibly “icons.”5 He insisted that anyone seeking only food would have waited an hour for the pantry to open, as though the mind of someone like Taylor was functioning with perfect logic and reason. So to Cutler the original sentence was justified. From his retirement perch, he objected to Taylor’s case having become what he pejoratively referred to as a cause célèbre.
Taylor won his freedom on a fluke. It was possible only because he had advocates who managed to find the judicial error. But in most cases, even when determined, competent attorneys take up the appeal, no such mistake can be found, so convicted defendants are serving out their terms no matter how great the distance between the sentence and genuine justice.
Most of us understand what it means to lose track of time. Time seems to move quicker when we’re thoroughly involved in some activity. But in case after case officials appear to lose their understanding of time’s value in relation to human life. That could explain why Assistant District Attorney Cutler and Superior Court Judge James Dunn agreed Taylor should serve a minimum of twenty-five years for his offense. It’s as though authorities lost their ability to assess how many days it takes for all those years to pass, how many times a man must rise from his prison bunk each morning to gaze into the mirror and search for signs of the inescapable aging that drained his life of another night. They never seem to wonder how it might affect Taylor to watch killers and child molesters enter the system and gain release while he remains behind.
Three-strikes laws regularly gain and lose force as courts interpret and reinterpret state laws. A federal appeals court in October 2010, for example, reinstated a rule that gave New York State judges the discretion to send nonviolent three-time losers to prison for fifteen to twenty-five years to life.6 Earlier rulings by lower courts had declared the law unconstitutional.
The contemporary three-strikes concept first took hold in Washington State, where voters approved it in a 1993 initiative.7 Many states quickly followed Washington’s lead. Although three-strikes laws are best known for establishing life sentences for third-time offenders, they also create a simple way for courts to extend the sentence for any crime classified as a “strike.” In most places three-strikes laws apply to violent crimes only, but in California, which was America’s three-strikes capital from 1994 to 2012, the statute applied to “serious,” though not necessarily violent, offenses. What’s more, a third strike didn’t have to be “serious.” In some circumstances a misdemeanor could be upgraded to a felony, and the defendant could be imprisoned for life—or at least decades.
Three out of four inmates leaving state prisons were convicted of nonviolent crimes.8 Most of these former inmates were jailed for drug crimes, and the rest tend to have been convicted of “property” crimes, such as burglary or receiving stolen goods. The law can distinguish between violence and lack of violence in ways that one might not expect. Entering a residence with the intent to steal when residents are home, for example, presents a potential for violence that constitutes first-degree burglary, an offense that remains an automatic strike in California. Darting into an open garage at noon and grabbing a garden hose or a bicycle, is, according to the statute, no different than breaking into an inhabited bedroom at 3:00 a.m. Running into two garages on the same street within a minute of each other can earn an offender two felony counts and two strikes. These interpretations of the law give an ambitious prosecutor a heavy club when the defense looks to strike a deal.9