I received a number of emails yesterday about the case where Steve Cooley’s District Attorney office refused to charge a criminal under three strikes (which would have put this criminal, whose prior felonies were for rape and residential burglary, away for life), and instead charged him in such a way that he would only serve 32 months in jail. The criminal got, and four days later killed a young girl.
The criminal had sold $5.00 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop. He had previous raped a woman, and broke into someone’s home. Had Cooley pursued three strikes vigorously, he would have been attacked by the left for giving a life sentence a relatively minor crime. But had he pursued three strikes, a homeless girl would be alive today, instead of the victim of a brutal murder by a hardened criminal.
Remember the so-called pizza thief, the guy who got a life sentence for stealing pizza from a ten year old boy? The left screamed about how unfair this was. What they did not tell you was that this thug had been convicted of armed robbery, aggravated assault, mayhem, and a series of other really ugly crimes. He stole the pizza from the boy by threatening to go to the boy’s home and kill his mother if the boy didn’t give him the pizza. That criminal deserved the sentence he got.
How about the controversy over the fellow who was let out of prison years after he cut off the arms and legs of a young woman. The only reason he didn’t go to prison for life was that the girl didn’t die. No one wanted this guy in their neighborhood, so California shipped him off to Florida. About a year later, he stole a $10 camera and a baseball cap. In California, he would have been eligible for three strikes treatment, and could have gone to jail for the rest of his life. Florida let him go after charging him with theft. A week later he killed a woman.
This is the point of three strikes. Someone who has committed two serious or violent felonies, and then goes out and commits a third felony has to go to prison until he or she dies. That is it. Prison isn’t for rehabilitation. Prison isn’t for punishment. Prison is to take bad people away from the rest of us, and keep them there long enough so that they won’t do us any harm. Someone who is habitually bad needs to be put away forever, so that we never have to worry about them again.
Those who think otherwise, like Steve Cooley, are fools. Three Strikes is not about punishing bad guys, it is about removing them from society so that we are all safer. Who cares if there is a little bad publicity? The criminal knows what will happen to him or her if he or she commits a third felony. They just don’t care. And that is what makes them dangerous. They don’t care if they might go to jail forever, and the more they get away with it, the worse they get, until someone dies.
One young homeless woman died so that Steve Cooley wouldn’t get a bad headline in the LA Times. That is not foolish, that is reprehensible. I haven’t taken a position in the Attorney General race, but I can say that a prosecutor, any prosecutor, who is afraid to put a bad guy in jail because it might hurt his reputation, doesn’t deserve the job of being a prosecutor, either in LA County or Sacramento. Three Strikes makes sense on a policy level, but more important, it makes us all safer. And that is why we have these kind of laws. Cooley is wrong on three strikes, and people have died because of his foolishness.