Proposed changes to California Three Strikes:

Patterico’s Pontifications disapproves of them, and gives some pretty good reasons, including some important legal points in this post:

Multiple separate violent crimes count as only one strike if tried in a single trial.
Under this rule, serial murderers and rapists would get only one strike conviction for their multiple violent crimes. For example, Richard Ramirez (the “Night Stalker”) would get only one strike for his 13 separate murder convictions. Charles Manson would have only one strike for his seven murder convictions in the Tate-LaBianca murder case. And from what I can tell, it appears that Richard Allen Davis, the guy who murdered Polly Klaas, never would have faced a third-strike sentence. . . .

The law redefines several offenses as non-strikes. For example, criminal death threats and most residential burglaries will not count as strike priors. You can now drive drunk (or lead police on a high-speed chase, or both) and put somebody in a wheelchair — and that’s not a strike if you didn’t specifically intend to do so. Setting a massive brush or forest fire — or two, or four — will no longer be considered a serious crime unless someone is hurt or a building burns down. . . .

The strike law will now apply only to third strikes that are “serious or violent.” This may sound attractive to some, but it is far too extreme a solution — especially in light of the redefinition of so many crimes as non-strikes. For example, Charlie Manson could be paroled and break into your house or threaten to kill you — and he wouldn’t face 25-to-life, despite his numerous previous murder convictions. Is this really what we want?

Probably the scariest thing about the initiative is that it opens the floodgates for hundreds of violent prisoners to be released. . . .

plus two pretty powerful examples in this one.

     I don’t think one can make a really informed judgment on these questions based just on examples, or on general principles — I’d like to hear more, for instance, about the profile of the average offender who’s likely to be released, so I can get some sense if the savings in prison costs are likely to outweigh the extra risk of future crimes. (The interests of the criminals, all of whom had to have had at least three felony convictions, two of which had to have been at least of the seriousness of residential burglaries, aren’t terribly important to me here, though I suppose they might play a small role.) Still, the examples help make concrete the problems that Patterico identifies.