Born of Grief, ‘Three Strikes’ Laws Are Being Rethought
By JANE GROSS, NYT
This week’s Retro Report video is a story of how personal tragedy led to what has been called one of the harshest criminal laws in the country, California’s “three strikes” law. Intended to lock up the most violent repeat offenders for 25 years to life, the law was almost immediately embroiled in controversy. For an examination of the effects of California’s three strikes law, watch the video above. Below, a former Bay Area bureau chief for The Times recalls the case that galvanized the proposition drive for the law.
To most of the world – back in 1992 and even now — Mike Reynolds’s effort to keep repeat violent offenders locked up for life after the murder of his 18-year-old daughter, Kimber, in Fresno, Calif., was a non-event, not the opening salvo of what would become a barrage of state laws and referendums eventually known as the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” movement.
Mr. Reynolds, a wedding photographer in California’s Central Valley, far from the media centers of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, was just a grieving father (could there be a less empathetic phrase?), whose youngest child, on a weekend visit home from college, had been shot in the head at point-blank range outside the Daily Planet restaurant by a man with a long criminal record.
Mr. Reynolds’s howl of helplessness took the form of a ballot initiative, Proposition 184, which called for sentences of 25 years to life for anyone previously convicted of two serious felonies. Mr. Reynolds began a lonely campaign to gain the necessary 385,000 signatures to put it before voters in a state with a long and often misguided history of governing by popular outrage rather than carefully created legislation. But Mr. Reynolds had only a shoestring budget, a small band of neighborhood volunteers who met in his living room, no nationwide attention and little hope of success until another dreadful crime galvanized the state, nation and world a year later.
(More here.)
This week’s Retro Report video is a story of how personal tragedy led to what has been called one of the harshest criminal laws in the country, California’s “three strikes” law. Intended to lock up the most violent repeat offenders for 25 years to life, the law was almost immediately embroiled in controversy. For an examination of the effects of California’s three strikes law, watch the video above. Below, a former Bay Area bureau chief for The Times recalls the case that galvanized the proposition drive for the law.
To most of the world – back in 1992 and even now — Mike Reynolds’s effort to keep repeat violent offenders locked up for life after the murder of his 18-year-old daughter, Kimber, in Fresno, Calif., was a non-event, not the opening salvo of what would become a barrage of state laws and referendums eventually known as the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” movement.
Mr. Reynolds, a wedding photographer in California’s Central Valley, far from the media centers of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, was just a grieving father (could there be a less empathetic phrase?), whose youngest child, on a weekend visit home from college, had been shot in the head at point-blank range outside the Daily Planet restaurant by a man with a long criminal record.
Mr. Reynolds’s howl of helplessness took the form of a ballot initiative, Proposition 184, which called for sentences of 25 years to life for anyone previously convicted of two serious felonies. Mr. Reynolds began a lonely campaign to gain the necessary 385,000 signatures to put it before voters in a state with a long and often misguided history of governing by popular outrage rather than carefully created legislation. But Mr. Reynolds had only a shoestring budget, a small band of neighborhood volunteers who met in his living room, no nationwide attention and little hope of success until another dreadful crime galvanized the state, nation and world a year later.
(More here.)
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