Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 16, 1994 TAG: 9403170024
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN CARLSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In 1990, Davis was convicted of an unprovoked assault on two people with an ice pick. His probation officer recommended a sentence of six years. The judge settled on three years, two months.
Late last year, just a few months after his release, Davis allegedly abducted a woman in Tacoma, Wash., took her back to his apartment and repeatedly raped her. When he finished, he took her to a nearby church, slashed her throat with a knife and hurled her body down a stairwell.
She survived. From her hospital bed, unable to speak, she drew a map for police to Davis' apartment and later identified him.
Because she didn't die, prosecutors couldn't charge Davis with murder and there was a chance he would one day walk free again. But three weeks before the attack, the ``three-strikes-and-you're-in'' law took effect in Washington. Anyone convicted there of a third major felony receives an automatic sentence of life in prison. No furloughs, no probation, no parole, no exceptions. The county prosecutor told a stunned Davis that, if convicted of this attack, he would be in prison for life.
So would 35-year-old Michael Johnson. He had several separate sex crimes on his record, along with a conviction for slicing his wife's throat and plunging the bloodied knife into her mouth (she survived and Johnson was charged with second-degree assault). On Christmas Day, five months after being released for that crime, he kidnaped a mother and her daughter in eastern Washington and repeatedly raped the girl. He was eventually apprehended and now faces life in prison with no chance of parole. Had ``three strikes'' been in effect earlier, he wouldn't have been loose to carry out the abduction and attack in the first place.
Three other criminals are also facing the prospect of being ensnared in Washington state's ``three strikes'' net and, while none has killed or raped, each of them averages six prior felonies and 11 misdemeanor convictions. They are career criminals, and only a pardon or act of clemency by the governor can one day set them free.
The state legislature and governor opposed this law, so the voters qualified it as statewide Initiative 593 and passed it over their heads with 76 percent of the vote. The support cut across political, racial, economic and geographic lines.
Initiative 593 restores the notion of punishing criminal behavior, rather than merely treating it as a social illness. It brings certainty and accountability back to the system. And since several studies show that letting a street criminal roam free costs at least twice as much to society as locking him up, it is cost-effective.
The good news is that this law not only keeps some dangerous criminals off the streets, it is sending scores of criminals and sex offenders out of the state. At least that's what police officers throughout Washington are reporting.
The bad news is they're coming to other states. I hope that state lawmakers throughout the rest of the country pass their own ``three strikes'' laws so that these criminals don't find other places more accepting of their behavior than Washington state now is.
John Carlson is the president of the Seattle-based Washington Institute for Policy Studies and the leader of the ``Three Strikes, You're Out'' campaign. He wrote this column for Newsday.
L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB