Blog Topic:

Using the “Synchronicity II” lyrics discuss the ideas of the individual finding his/her own meaning in life versus conforming to the ideas of society. What are the advantages and disadvantages of conforming to society?

Be sure to use at least 100 words.

“Synchronicity II”
   ------Sting & Police

Another suburban family morning
Grandmother screaming at the wall
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Crispies
We can't hear anything at all
Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration
But we know all her suicides are fake
Daddy only stares into the distance
There's only so much heartache he can take
Many miles away
Something crawls from the slime
At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake

Another industrial ugly morning
The factory belches filth into the sky
He walks unhindered through the picket lines today
He doesn't think to wonder why …

Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race
Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now looming in his headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache
Many miles away
There's a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark Scottish lake
Many miles away, many miles away

If you cannot save your work to a thumbdrive in class, you may cut and paste your school document here for use later tonight.  Due 10/7. 

Define the terms “utopia” and “dystopia” and relate those terms to this novel.  ****Remember 50-75 words

Jean Valjean Lives

Petty criminals face harsh future after three strikes cases

Nicholas N. Kittrie and Mark H. Allenbaugh
Legal Times
May 2, 2003

March 4, 2003, was one [heck] of a day for criminal sentencing at the U.S. Supreme Court. In two separate opinions -- Lockyer v. Andrade and Ewing v. California -- a divided Court upheld the constitutionality of California's controversial "three strikes and you're out" statute. A sentencing measure intended to combat serious criminal recidivists, the three strikes law requires that third-time felons be sentenced from 25 years to life for their last felony.

The law of criminal sentencing -- historically left mostly to the discretion of trial judges and significantly reformed in recent years by complicated sets of guidelines and mandatory minimums -- might seem arcane. But it functions in a real sense as the business end of our criminal law system. Getting convicted is one thing; serving time is another.

And one of the primary tenets of sentencing law since the time of the Magna Carta has been proportionality -- the idea that a convict should receive a sentence that bears a reasonable relationship to the severity of the crime. Without a sense of proportionality, a penal system runs the risk of imposing draconian sentences on minor criminals. Such a sentencing system, by focusing on the wrong class of offenders, not only offends society's fundamental sense of justice, but also unreasonably burdens the public resources in a vain pursuit to reduce crime. That's where sentencing law stops being arcane. Without proportionality, we start treating prisoners like Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," who was sent to prison for years for stealing a loaf of bread.

JAIL TIME FOR BREAD?

Proportionality was the key issue in Andrade and Ewing. The Court was asked to consider when the gravity of a state criminal penalty under a three strikes law is so "grossly disproportionate" to the severity of the offense that the sentence constitutes a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Twenty years ago, in Solem v. Helm, the Supreme Court stated that the Eighth Amendment "prohibits ... sentences that are disproportionate to the crime committed," and that "[t]he constitutional principle of proportionality has been recognized explicitly in this Court for almost a century." Moreover, just last year, the Supreme Court wrote in Atkins v. Virginia that the "Eighth Amendment succinctly prohibits 'excessive' sanctions."

But Ewing and Andrade illustrate that the Supreme Court now has washed its hands of proportionality concerns, and seems ready to allow states to return to the world of Jean Valjean.

The petitioner in Ewing was no stranger to the criminal justice system. With a significant rap sheet and out on parole for a nine-year burglary sentence, Gary Ewing was arrested in March 2000 for stealing three golf clubs, valued at $399 apiece. He was charged and convicted of felony grand theft. The trial court determined that Ewing had been previously convicted of four serious or violent felonies: three burglaries and a robbery. Pursuant to California's three strikes law, the trial court sentenced Ewing to 25 years to life.

Like Ewing, Leandro Andrade also had extensive experience with the criminal justice system. Unlike Ewing's third strike, Andrade's third strike amounted only to misdemeanors: two petty thefts from two Kmart stores amounting to $153.54 worth of videotapes. But because Andrade had prior felony convictions, the prosecutor had the option under California law to charge the petty thefts as felonies for purposes of qualifying Andrade for his third strike, which the prosecutor, of course, did. The trial court also had discretion to treat such petty thefts as misdemeanors, but declined to.

Moreover, because Andrade's petty thefts occurred at separate Kmart stores two weeks apart, each theft was counted as a separate third strike. Andrade, in essence, struck out twice. Rather than being sentenced to a single term of 25 years to life, he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life, meaning 50 years to life for stealing nine videotapes (about 5.5 years per tape).

NOT A SENTENCING ANOMALY

Andrade's sentence is not an anomaly. More than 300 offenders in California prisons serving sentences of 25 years to life had third strikes that were merely misdemeanors.

With growing public complaints about the severity of the three strikes law, as well as the severity of other punitive measures enacted in this country's war on crime, it was hoped that the Supreme Court finally would take the opportunity to expand on Solem's proportionality analysis in this new era of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.

But the Court did not. The 5-4 majority ultimately concluded that the California Legislature's judgment regarding the severity of criminal sentences should not be disturbed. In Andrade, the majority blithely conceded that "[o]ur cases exhibit a lack of clarity regarding what factors may indicate gross disproportionality." Rather than setting things straight, the Supreme Court majority instead embraced the lack of clarity as a basis not to disturb Andrade's sentence.

In Ewing, the Court similarly ducked the proportionality issue, but for somewhat different reasons. Here, the Court primarily deferred to the state legislature: "Though three strikes laws may be relatively new, our tradition of deferring to state legislatures in making and implementing such important policy decisions is longstanding." (Ewing also indicated that the Court would give special deference to laws initiated by popular referendums, as was California's three strikes law.) Thus, the plurality of justices declined to address the proportionality issue by stating that "criticism is appropriately directed at the legislature, which has primary responsibility for making the difficult policy choices that underlie any criminal sentencing scheme."

The Supreme Court's failure to review the three strikes laws in light of the Eighth Amendment leaves the nation's courts, sentencing commissions and legislatures without a clear definition of the principle prohibiting "gross disproportionality" or "excessive sanctions." Some commentators rightly may complain that it is not clear that this principle even exists any longer. Indeed, according to the concurring opinions of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in Ewing, the requirement of proportionality is not contained in the Eighth Amendment. They assert that the Eighth Amendment prohibits only cruel and unusual means of punishment.

After Ewing and Andrade, one cannot tell how the Supreme Court will respond in the future to Justice David Souter's dissenting opinion in Andrade that "[i]f Andrade's sentence is not grossly disproportionate, the principle has no meaning."

EIGHTH AMENDMENT COATTAILS

What is easier to tell is that state legislatures and, perhaps more important, state sentencing commissions have been left undisturbed in their pursuit of increasingly blunt means to fight criminality. The decisions in Ewing and Andrade also suggest that the much-criticized mandatory minimum sentences for specified offenses and offenders will likewise survive Eighth Amendment challenges in the Supreme Court. After all, what is a three strikes law if not a mandatory minimum in expansive form?

Similar survival skills are foreseen for the federal sentencing guidelines. Interestingly, the guidelines nominally proclaim their adherence to the proportionality principle, denominating it "just desert." But in fact, the guidelines consider more than the severity of the offense. They also accord considerable weight to the offender's criminal history. This approach, in practice, greatly resembles the three strikes test.

After Andrade and Ewing, if any legislature, state or federal, in its wisdom chooses to enact harsh and excessive penalties, far be it for the Supreme Court to correct the wrongs. The Supreme Court failed to undertake a substantive review of California's three strikes law in light of the Court's own previously recognized constitutional proportionality standards. Instead, it has, in effect, left state legislatures, sentencing commissions, judges, and, to a growing degree, prosecutors wide discretion to decree such criminal penalties as they deem just or even merely expedient in response to popular panic or pressure. Inspector Javert, the pursuer of Jean Valjean in "Les Miserables," may yet live again.

Not surprisingly, there is ample opportunity for epic wrongs. Currently, 24 states and the federal government have enacted some form of three strikes law. A recent New York Times article reports that more than 7,000 people in California alone are serving sentences of at least 25 years under that state's three strikes law. Many thousands more, of course, are now serving similar sentences under related laws in other jurisdictions.

Maybe the producers of "Les Mis" had a premonition of what the Supreme Court had in store. Soon Jean Valjean will no longer dramatize the injustice of his sentence to the public -- the show is set to close on Broadway this month.

Nicholas N. Kittrie is university professor of law and former dean at American University Washington College of Law. Mark H. Allenbaugh, a former staff attorney for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, is an associate with D.C.'s Montedonico, Belcuore & Tazzara. They are co-editors of "Sentencing, Sanctions, and Corrections: Federal and State Law, Policy, and Practice" (2d ed., Foundation Press, 2002). The views of the authors are solely their own.