Hardball Justice Laws call crime out on strikes; protest is filed
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There are said to be people out there who can describe all of life in terms of baseball metaphors. And why not? The rules of the game are clean and clear to anyone, even criminals. So it came as no surprise that public officials who had emptied the bench in the war on crime but were still losing turned to baseball for a strategy. Thus was born in the 1990s the wide enactment of anticrime laws know as Three Strikes and You’re Out; 25 state legislatures created Three Strikes laws. The plague of powerful drugs in public places, however, became the sport of thugs, distributors and pushers who played by no one’s rules; so for them Congress created a special rule around public housing projects: One Strike, You’re Out. Briefly, the former laws say that if you get convicted of three felonies, you risk being sent to jail for life; the other law, passed by Congress, said public housing tenants could lose their lease, get kicked out, if a family member or guest did drugs in the project. The Supreme Court just ruled, 8 to 0, that the One Strike law is constitutional, and this past week it agreed to hear a challenge to California’s very strict Three Strikes law. The law of course is its own kind of game, and the lawyers who brought these cases made sure the conflict between the laws and the defendants of record was teed up for the public as a battle between Goliath and grandma. The defendant-tenants in the public housing case, from Oakland, included a partially paralyzed 75-year-old, a diabetic 71-year-old and a 63-year-old grandma (whose eviction was dropped “after her daughter was incarcerated and thus no longer posed a threat to other tenants”). The defendant in the California Three Strikes case is Leandro Andrade, and virtually any press report you read will make sure you know that his third strike, for which he received a life sentence, was stealing nine videos from two Kmarts. But more on Mr. Andrade’s idea of citizenship later. More : opinionjournal.com |