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(8,283 posts) Sun Apr 2, 2023, 01:54 AM Apr 2023

How Two Supreme Court Cases Made "Cruel and Unusual Punishment" Meaningless

How Two Supreme Court Cases Made "Cruel and Unusual Punishment" Meaningless

Twenty-five years ago, the conservatives decided that millions of people out on parole should have fewer civil rights than anyone else.

On November 5, 1995, Leandro Andrade walked into a Kmart in Ontario, California, and tried to steal copies of five kids’ movies, including Snow White, Casper, and The Fox and the Hound. A security guard stopped him, and police arrested Andrade for shoplifting.

Two weeks later, Andrade walked into a different Kmart and picked up four more videotapes: this time, Free Willy 2, Cinderella, The Santa Clause, and Little Women. Again, he was apprehended and arrested. A military veteran and father of three, Andrade said the movies were supposed to be gifts for his nieces and nephews. Together, their retail value was about $150.

At the time in California, a first-time offender in Andrade’s shoes would normally face a penalty of up to a year in jail. Andrade had been previously convinced of a handful of nonviolent theft- and drug-related charges. With his record, if he’d tried to steal the videotapes just a few years earlier, he’d have been looking at a prison term of up to three years and eight months—about five months for each tape.

Andrade, however, was sentenced at the peak of the tough-on-crime panic that dominated American politics in the 1990s. A year earlier, California had become one of some two dozen states to enact a “three-strikes” law, which imposed progressively harsher punishments on so-called repeat offenders. Suddenly, a third felony conviction, even for a crime like petty theft, triggered a potential sentence of 25 years to life. (The district attorney in San Bernardino County, Dennis Stout, had the option to charge Andrade with a misdemeanor in order to avoid a three-strikes sentence. Stout, who called Andrade “a scoundrel who has had his chances,” sought the maximum penalty instead.)

Incredibly, the circumstances of Andrade’s offense yielded an even more brutal outcome: Remember, he had tried to shoplift on two separate occasions from different Kmart stores. Thus, a judge decided to sentence him to two 25-to-life sentences, to be served consecutively. Andrade, a 37-year-old man who’d never committed a violent crime, would not be eligible for parole until 2046, when he’d be 87 years old.

Andrade’s appeal eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard his case alongside that of Gary Ewing, another three-striker who’d been sentenced to life for stealing a few golf clubs from a Los Angeles-area course in March 2000. Both men asked the justices to decide essentially the same question: whether the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment should prevent the government from sentencing you to life in prison for stealing a few hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.

Twenty years ago this month, the Court said no. In her majority opinion in Lockyer v. Andrade, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded that Andrade’s sentence was not “objectively unreasonable.”