False Justice

6 Pages 1427 Words

False Justice
Leandro Anrade, a thirty-seven year old man with a non-violent record, was sentenced to fifty years to life in prison for stealing 153 dollars worth of videotapes. Leandro’s sentence is a raw product of California’s Three Strikes Laws. California’s Three Strikes Laws were erected in March of 1994 and have been the center controversy since their debut. Basically the laws state that if anyone is convicted of any crime three times and it can be three different crimes, whether it be a petty, or serious crime, they are sentenced to twenty-five years to life automatically. (Marks 2) Do these laws even seem remotely rational? Not according to California prosecutors, who only use the law in about ten percent of the eligible cases. (Dolan and Perry 3) That means ninety percent of all prosecutors in California ignore the ludicrous laws because they are not reasonable judgments. Why would you even have the laws when it doesn’t achieve the purpose it was produced to do? The reason behind that question lies in one major fallacy; the laws are unjust to petty crime offenders. When California’s voters condemned the laws in 1994 they were put under the influence that it would only pertain to felony, or serious crime convictions. The fact that someone can be sent to jail for at least twenty-five years for writing bad checks, stealing videos, selling drugs and so forth is unfair to the criminals and the tax payers of California who have to pay for larger prisons to welcome in the massive amounts of criminals who are sentenced under the three strikes laws, sixty percent of them being non-violent offenders. (Marks 2) Overall the laws have decreased the crime rates in California, but that can also be the result of a trend in that generally the whole country has been experiencing within the last ten years. These unreasonable laws should be altered in that they should only pertain to felonies and serious offenses.
Even though I fee...