cannabisnews.com: Looking for a Strike Out 





Looking for a Strike Out 
Posted by FoM on December 28, 1999 at 18:04:40 PT
By Catherine Bridge
Source: Cal Law
She grew up poor in the Fillmore District, attended Lowell High School and went on to earn her law degree from UCLA. Now attorney Valerie Monroe runs a criminal defense practice in the upscale Los Angeles suburb of Palos Verdes. Despite the shift in surroundings, this NAACP activist and former San Franciscan has just taken on the political crusade of a lifetime. 
Together with private investigator and perennial Peace and Freedom Party gadfly Jan Tucker, Monroe is launching the first initiative effort aimed at the 1994 "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, modifying it so that a third strike is reserved for serious and violent felonies only. Monroe and Tucker, however, are only one of a pair of Southern Californian odd couples launching nearly identical initiatives. Next door in Orange County, Sam Clauder, a political consultant who specializes in paid signature gathering, has enlisted the star power of Joe Klaas, grandfather of murder victim Polly Klaas, as his co-proponent on a similar measure. Three years ago, Clauder tried and failed to put a measure on the ballot legalizing hemp. Both pairs dream of making long-shot end-runs around a Legislature and governor that strongly support the Three Strikes status quo, as well as changing the minds of some of the 72 percent of the electorate that voted to pass the Three Strikes initiative in 1994. They are counting on a visceral public reaction, akin to their own, to what they believe is the draconian way the law has been applied. "Whether I'm hobnobbing in Palos Verdes in a three-piece suit or in the 'hood the next day with my hair down," says Tucker, "everywhere I go the public has heard stories about stealing a macadamia nut and going to prison for life." Yet each pair of proponents must gather upwards of 419,000 signatures to qualify its measure for the November 2000 ballot, then raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars a modern initiative campaign requires. Neither side is talking to the other yet. A bellwether for the fortune of the November Three Strikes measures may come in a get-tough-on-youth-offenders measure in March. If Proposition 21 -- the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act -- falters, it could signal improved prospects for an easing of Three Strikes. Clauder calls the fledgling efforts to amend Three Strikes "too fragile to be fractured." But he says Monroe and Tucker as the first out of the gate don't want to work with him and didn't contact activists like those in Families to Amend California's Three Strikes [FACTS] before launching their drive. He hopes the two initiatives will eventually coalesce, but deplores as well-meaning naivete his rivals' plans to mount an all-volunteer signature drive: "It's been 20 years since an all-volunteer drive succeeded," he scoffs. Meanwhile, strategic power brokers on the left worry that these neophytes might unwittingly energize a right-wing backlash next November, sending conservative voters swarming to the polls to defeat any modification of Three Strikes and taking down other liberal causes with it. Meanwhile, activists in groups like FACTS plan to support both versions and wait for the dust to settle. Ironically, what's fueling both initiative efforts is precisely what fueled the passage of Three Strikes five years ago: an outraged sense of justice gone awry. For Monroe, a criminal law specialist with 20 years experience, opposition crystallized in court last February when she lost a third strike case and saw her parolee client sent to jail for 25 years to life on a gun possession charge. LABOR ON BOARD Monroe calls Three Strikes "the worst law I've ever seen in terms of fairness, common sense and enlightened penal policy." Voters were duped in 1994, she believes, thinking they were voting for severe punishment for repeat offenders when the law has more routinely meant severe punishment for what she characterizes as non-serious, non-violent offenders. "I couldn't sit through another such trial," she says. "Now I know how Rosa Parks felt when she wouldn't go to the back of the bus: The law is just wrong." Monroe and Tucker have enlisted the state branch of the NAACP with its 77 affiliates as co-sponsor, won endorsements from the 700,000 member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Libertarian Party, among others. They hope to use an entirely volunteer effort to gather signatures for their "California Three Strikes Project Initiative," piggybacking on labor's get-out-the vote drive in next March's primary, then enlisting deep-pocket supporters once the measure is on the ballot. "It's exceptional to see an initiative come from our community and to have that process used for us instead of against us," says Alice Huffman, the newly-elected head of the NAACP's state conference. "Our community feels very strongly that Three Strikes has had a disproportionate and negative impact on its members." Representing some 7 percent of the state's population, African-Americans comprise 31 percent of prison inmates and 44 percent of third-strikers, according to the most recent statistics from the California Department of Corrections. Huffman, a Sacramento activist who has run initiative campaigns, says the key is to professionalize the effort and draw in a wider spectrum of supporters, such as churches and trial lawyers. "I think if we talk about [this initiative] as the very minor amendment it is," she says, "we can go far." Tucker, a lifetime activist who plans to run for the U.S. Senate on the Green Party ticket next year, and whose myriad causes have ranged from animal rights to legalized prostitution, calls the L.A. County Federation of Labor's endorsement "our big plum: It was unanimous and done with real enthusiasm and means an enormous amount of free labor." Well, maybe, according to political analyst Gary Smith of the L.A. County Federation. "Usually we don't get ahead of the state federation on this," Smith said, "but it was sufficiently important to our Southern Californian membership that we went out on a limb." Smith estimates that membership in the local is nearly half minority due to the large numbers of service workers in unionized hotels and restaurants. "No one in the union advocates wholesale leniency to violent felons," he says, "but when you look at who's in prison, for what and their racial characteristics, we decided we had to take a second look." State labor leaders, however, note that their limited resources need to go to bread and butter issues. "We have major problems with the results of Three Strikes and what it's done to increase the prison population, but we are very far from taking a position," said Tom Rankin, president of the California Labor Federation. In January, labor leaders will meet to determine their position on various ballot measures, but will consider only those already slated for the March primary. TWO TRAINS RUNNING Even while holding out hope of future collaboration, Clauder stresses the differences between his "Citizens Against Violent Crime Initiative" and Monroe and Tucker's effort. He faults the pair for meeting the press with a Nation of Islam minister in tow. The inclusion of more radical elements in the black community "alienates most voters," he says. "They represent convicts: I'm a victim of violent crime and relate to Joe Klaas; I represent people who want change because they are compassionate and concerned about money being thrown down the drain [on prisons]." He freely admits to gathering signatures and voting for Three Strikes in 1994, but says he was "hoodwinked" into believing the law would apply only to serious and violent crimes. "I made a mistake, and I want to correct it," he says. He drafted his initiative with input from judges, deputy district attorneys and criminal defense lawyers, he says, thus making it superior to the version drafted by Tucker and Monroe. He plans to draw on those law enforcement ties to link up with state and national legal associations to raise the approximately $500,000 he plans to spend. He points to what he characterizes as "huge writing on the wall," a just-released poll from UC Riverside's Presley Center for Crime and Justice that indicates 93 percent of respondents in a statewide phone survey agree that Three Strikes should apply only to serious and violent crimes. "I'm very excited," says Clauder, "because this asks the same questions we would have had we conducted private polling. We can use this to back our initiative." While both bills mandate that any felony qualifying for a strike must be serious or violent, Clauder also proposes only one strike per criminal act, retroactive sentencing and making the Three Strikes law easier to amend in the future. Monroe and Tucker's version focuses on limiting strikes to serious or violent crimes, and includes a retroactive sentencing proposal. But they dropped an initial proposal to exempt juvenile priors. Clauder claims the juvenile proposal was excised after Monroe and Tucker saw his version. Both initiatives have left grass-roots activists somewhat non-plussed, according to Doug Kaeso, an attorney and UC Irvine doctoral candidate in criminology who works with FACTS. "We couldn't do an initiative ourselves and were unsure of the timing, so we didn't ask anyone for help this year," he says. Even if they could have qualified a measure for the ballot, they worried about the lack of funding to counter what is expected to be an avalanche of attack ads. They were caught off-guard by Monroe and Tucker's decision to mount an initiative. "We've been doing this for three years and felt we had a loud enough voice that they would have contacted us first," said Kaeso. When Clauder at least approached them before filing, "Our Orange County chapter felt a stronger connection with him," said Kaeso. "He told us he could gather the money -- he could just be selling us snake oil, but the other group doesn't have any money." Still, suspicions about Clauder's motives linger. "He helped gather signatures for the original Three Strikes and the [upcoming] juvenile justice initiative," notes Kaeso. "The more initiatives out there, the more money he makes." FACTS is backing both initiatives and will gather signatures for both. 'THIRD-STRIKERS DON'T COME AS VIRGINS' Supporters of Three Strikes, like its co-author, Secretary of State Bill Jones, say that public backing for the measure has -- if anything -- increased since its '94 passage. "Polling was still up in the 80th percentile [last November]," said Jones, who hopes to ride his role in drawing up the measure into higher office. At home in Fresno over Thanksgiving week, he said judges came up to him at public meetings to congratulate him for providing them with "the most effective tool" they've ever had. "Among the population, they're supportive," said Jones. "Among those who administer it, they're supportive . . . in any prison you visit, the strikers tell you they want to leave California." Even district attorneys who initially opposed a non-serious, non-violent third strike have come around, because Jones says, "We built flexibility into the bill, knowing that DAs have to stand for election: Now they're the first to support leaving it as it is." He fiercely defends the impact of his stringent sentencing law in black communities, saying African-Americans have cited the high black-on-black crime rate in inner cities in telling him "We need this law or we can't get business to come in, our kids can't walk to school safely." In fact, it is the notion of victimhood which seems to supply the key difference between supporters and opponents. Jones and proponents, like Susan Fisher of the Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau, cite hundreds of thousands of fewer victims. "Third-strikers don't come as virgins," says Fisher. "We endorse this version because we don't see the need for anyone to have a third victim." And she says the criminal justice community and some 400 crime victim organizations stand ready to fight tooth and nail to defend the law as is. But the initiative sponsors see reasons to be hopeful for change. The racial disparity -- as well as a regular stream of stories where third-strikers last crime was the theft of medication, pizza or chocolate -- have fueled opposition. "We're bucking the notion that no progressive criminal justice initiative ever makes it to the ballot," says Tucker. Together with a growing chorus of academic critics, they hope to convince the public that too many third-strikers are going to prison for life for non-violent felonies, often minor theft or drug possession they characterize as victimless crimes. "Voters did not intend for someone who committed a minor crime to spend the rest of his life in jail," says the NAACP's Huffman. "If we can get a cross-section of people supporting that notion, we can succeed." © NLP IP Company, Tuesday, December 28, 1999 
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