Critics Want 'Three Strikes' Law Loosened

Foxnews ^ | 3-1-04

[Indy Pendance]

LOS ANGELES

[Indy Pendance]

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[freedumb2003]

Shouldn't that be "losened"?

[Scenic Sounds]

Isn't this one of your issues?

[squidly]

Hard for me to have a lot of sympathy for a guy with two prior burglary offenses. If he's on his third, it's almost certain there would have been a fourth. However, there are other IMO lesser offenses than burglary that get included in this 3 strikes law, and some of them probably shouldn't.

[Drango]

I say we make it a 2 strikes law...

[goodnesswins]

Well...sheesh...if they don't want sooo many affected by the law....tell the little criminals to quit being criminals....it's really not that difficult, is it?

[Cathryn Crawford]

So it is. Maybe the critics got something right for once!

[harpseal]

Since the three-strike policy became law, the state's crime rate has dropped almost 50 percent, despite a one-third increase in population,

Now who says liberals do not want to see more crime.

[FreedomCalls]

Since the three-strike policy became law, the state's crime rate has dropped almost 50 percent

Hello cause, meet effect. But liberals are blinded to that one little fact -- they see a 50 percent drop off in crime and wonder why they need the three strikes law anymore since crime is dropping. They can't see facts even when hit upside the head with them.

[Amerigomag]

Critics say the law casts too wide of a net, sweeping up thousands of petty criminals and shoplifters and putting them away for decades

That's why we voted for the law.

Now if we could just pass a "Three Illegal Crossings" law and deport them to inside the beltway we'd be set.

[findingtruth]

Well...sheesh...if they don't want sooo many affected by the law....tell the little criminals to quit being criminals....it's really not that difficult, is it?

You'd be surprised. What with gun control laws, the Patriot Act, hate crimes legislation, etc., the government can make criminals out of most any of us, and probably will.

[ccmay]

I say three strikes and you're REALLY out. Anyone who has been convicted of three serious felonies is a waste of oxygen and should be put to death.

-ccm

[Wally_Kalbacken]

Ranking right up there for Best Laffs on C-SPAN had to be  a conference I saw several years ago - including the amazing Maxine Waters howlin' and a bitchin' in front of Mothers Against Mandatory Minimums. I kid thee not. Here are a bunch of black mothers who are agitating against mandatory minimums and three strikes laws - because they place so many black males in prison. Rather than, of course, the behavior of the black males in contravention of the law. Ugh. You see this kind of stupidity and you watch the jumping and jiving mobs in Haiti and you ponder the possibility that there could be a difference.

[dc27]

When I worked at Safeway, the store security caught this guy shoplifting, it took five of us to hold the guy down until the cops showed up. Turned out, the shoplifting was going to be his third strike.

[John Beresford Tipton]

"What with gun control laws, the Patriot Act, hate crimes legislation, etc., the government can make criminals out of most any of us, and probably will."

Bingo, we're just serfs waiting on our imperial masters' pleasure!

That there are too many such laws and that a prosecutor can pick his victim and then find the law to nail him is well known. Justice Jackson, a former US Attorney General and later Justice of the Supreme court wrote:

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some sort on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who committed it, it is a question of picking the man, and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

[ApplegateRanch]

What they b*tching about? When we were growing up, the "third strike" elicited a death penalty. "Three time loser" really meant something, way back then.

I guess the gripe is that the drop in crime is cutting into the vested interests' wallets. Surely we wouldn't want criminal lawyers, prosecutors, and judges to have their jobs in danger, would we?

I also object to this 'violent crime' argument. ALL crimes are traumatic to the victim, whether it is physically violent or not.

Typical Left: If it works, break it!

[Nick Danger]

[CyberAnt]

"state's crime rate has dropped almost 50 percent"

What is it these people don't get.

[Senormechanico]

"I say three strikes and you're REALLY out. Anyone who has been convicted of three serious felonies is a waste of oxygen and should be put to death."



I'm not quite THAT harsh, but we don't need more prisons, we just need to put a point system in place.
Each crime gets a certain amount of points according to it's severity. If the prison gets too crowded, "off" the one with the most points to make room for the newbie, or 'off" the newbie if he's the high point holder. It would make ALL the prisoners encourage their pals and everyone else on the outside to stay out of jail.

(I can dream, can't I?)

SM