Alex Maese is an example of how mistaken critics can be when they claim, as they have for decades, that Californians are not smart enough for direct democracy via ballot propositions.
Maese was convicted in 1997 of possessing a fragment of a cotton ball containing 0.029 grams of heroin, then sentenced to life in prison. No court at the time saw evidence of how he was using that tiny drug dose to self-medicate post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from his service in Viet Nam.
Stanford Law School students learned of his case, and in 2008 convinced a Kern County judge to release Maese on the basis of the 11 years he had already served. Having completed a residential drug rehab program, he lives in Los Angeles.
Maese’s case and the trivial offense that triggered his harsh sentence under California’s Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out law was typical of those that spurred voters almost a year ago to pass Prop. 36 by an overwhelming 69-31 percent margin.
It has become clear that initiative is working well. Prop. 36 is far from alone. The 2008 Marsy’s Law, passed as Prop. 9, today forces notification of victims and their relatives whenever there’s a bail or parole hearing for persons accused or convicted of harming them.
The 1988 Prop. 103 still keeps California car and property insurance rates below national averages. There are many more examples.
Humaneness at Its Best
Prop. 36, the most recent significant initiative success story, is among the most humane measures voters have ever passed.
Designed to mitigate some of the obvious overkill spawned by the 1990s-era Three Strikes sentencing law, this initiative has produced the early release of more than 1,000 convicts whose third strikes were as minor as stealing a car jack from an open tow truck or shoplifting a pair of shoes for a child.
Two thousand more similar prisoners probably are in line for release in the next year, with hundreds more yearly now spared long prison terms for petty offenses. This is why there’s hope of success for new plans to comply with federal court orders to lower prison populations.
When all the eligibles are released, Prop. 36 will be saving taxpayers more than $70 million yearly.
The News Gets Better
That’s the upshot of an autumn report from the Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
So far they haven’t committed many new crimes. Their recidivism rate of 2 percent is well under the statewide average of 16 percent committing new offenses within similar time periods after release.
Early results demonstrate the soundness of voters’ instincts in softening Three Strikes to make its maximum 25-years-to-life sentence apply only when the third felony conviction is for a violent or serious crime. The law also allows prisoners serving sentences now deemed excessive by the voters to seek resentencing.
The humanity of the initiative was demonstrated in the Stanford-NAACP report with several individual cases successfully pursued by law students in the lead-up to Prop. 36.
Besides Maese, there was Gregory Taylor. He broke into a church soup kitchen in 1997 and took food, getting a life sentence for his trouble. Released in 2010, he helps manage a sober-living community.
It’s probably too early to know how many such success stories will emerge from Prop. 36. Or how many failures there will be.
Early signs look positive, with judges having granted re-sentencing under the new law to almost all those requesting it, as lawyers make their way through the least controversial cases first.
Bottom line: If those released get substance- abuse counseling, mental health services and transitional housing, expect the early results to hold up.
Mr. Elias may be contacted at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net
