At 07:33 PM 3/8/96 -0800, jamesd wrote:

Also he did not steal the pizza. He destroyed it in the course of intimidating some kids who were eating pizza.

In theory one would expect the law to have this unjust effect, but in practice most of the poster boys that people give as examples of the injustice of this law are folk that one would like to see taken behind a barn and shot out of hand.

The pizza guy was a thug, but twice as many third-strikers got their third strike for marijuana as for all violent crimes combined. I assume most of these had large quantities, possibly intended for sale, and a number of them had real crimes as their previous felonies rather than Prohibition-related offenses. But you can get legally serious quantities of marijuana by just growing a couple of plants.

Perhaps the prosecutors are exercising prosecutorial discretion?

Not much - Government Radio said tonight that they're not allowed to plea-bargain third strike felonies down to misdemeanors. The LA public defender's office is absolutely swamped, partly because third-strike cases are supposed to get diligent support, and partly because they have to go to trial rather than plea-bargaining a guilty, which is less work. The county jails are also having serious crowding problems, because prospective third-strikers are being kept in them pending trial to avoid risk of flight, so non-third-strike jailees are getting out early (especially drug violators.) And the guys who just got busted for having fertilizer, diesel oil, and drugs on their farm had a whole three ounces of marijuana and personal-use quantities of crank. Maybe they were planning to blow up buildings rather than stumps; but the Feds are trying to paint them as max evil just to build up their case. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissable." - US government statement on China...