Court Is Right to Support Some Sentencing Discretion

The California Supreme Court continues to demonstrate that lawmaking is rarely as simple as voters sometimes think--or wish. Last week, the state high court again turned its attention to California’s “three strikes and you’re out� criminal law and once again ruled that the law imposes unacceptable limits on judicial discretion. The decision was one of a string of opinions clarifying the sentencing law that voters passed overwhelmingly in 1994. Taken together, the decisions affirm that indeed judges were meant to exercise reasonable judgment in order to ensure that the punishment fits the crime.

In last week’s decision, a 5-2 majority upheld a ruling by a Los Angeles trial judge who reduced a drug conviction from a felony to a misdemeanor. That decision allowed the three-strikes defendant to receive probation for his offense--possession of half a gram of powdered methamphetamine--rather than 25 years in prison as the law mandates for all third felony convictions.

Dozens of relatively minor crimes like this are called “wobblers,� meaning they could be treated as felonies or misdemeanors. Other wobbler offenses include petty and grand theft, commercial burglary and assault with a deadly weapon other than a gun.

The question before the court involved the limits of a judge’s discretion to reduce to misdemeanors some wobblers filed as felonies by prosecutors. Such a choice by a judge is a significant one. The law rightly mandates terms of 25 years to life for a third serious or violent felony. Those who commit them deserve a life behind bars. As a matter of fact, criminals whose first offense is a serious or violent felony should be dealt a harsh sentence and serve it fully. Trial judges, considering the specific facts in each case, strive to fit the punishment to the crime. So said Justice Janice Rogers Brown, writing for the majority.

The state Supreme Court’s three-strikes decisions have wisely not followed ideological lines. Last June the high court unanimously held that trial judges have the right to ignore prior felony convictions “in the interest of justice� when sentencing second- and third-strike defendants. Yet in a subsequent decision the court ruled that a three-strikes defendant may not erase a prior conviction on the grounds that his former lawyer was incompetent. It also held that out-of-state convictions count as strikes.

In this series of decisions on one of California’s most dramatic criminal laws, the Supreme Court rightly has moved away from an absolutist sentencing structure--one that has had severe unintended consequences for courts and the state prison budget--in favor of a shades-of-gray approach.

If that nuanced approach is not what some voters had in mind when they approved the three-strikes law it is nonetheless what our criminal justice system, predicated on due process and proportionality, requires.