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Comment by mysterypie | Hacker News Reader

Before laughing too much at the European idea of justice, think of the absurd sentencing that regularly happens in the US: A "60 Minutes" story some years ago reported that a California man was sentenced to life in prison for shoplifting two double-A batteries. Yes, life for a pack of AA batteries.

He was a twice convicted felon who had already served his time but got mandatory life for a third crime, even a misdemeanor like shoplifting, under California's three strikes law.

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> Before laughing too much at the European idea of justice, think of the absurd sentencing that regularly happens in the US: A "60 Minutes" story some years ago reported that a California man was sentenced to life in prison for shoplifting two double-A batteries.

Note that this is not something that "regularly happens in the US", it seems to be an illustration of a failure mode of California's particular implementation of a "three strikes" law under Prop 184 of 1994, which was abnormally severe (not requiring the third felony strike to be "serious or violent", as most three-strikes laws in the US do) -- and it seems to be a seriously misremembered one, at that, since even when this version of three strikes existed in CA, it still required the third strike to be a felony.

Also, this rule was changed to align CA's three strikes implementation with the common rule requiring the third strike to be a "serious or violent" felony in by Prop 36 in 2012 (which also provided a process for after-the-fact sentence adjustment for those sentenced under the old version for a third strike that would not have been subject to the enhanced sentence under the reformed version of the three strikes.)

Thank you for the insightful reply. However, I am not misremembering the story about the AA batteries. There was something in the original story about the third crime automatically getting elevated to a felony. So, yes, it needs to be a felony, but a minor third crime gets elevated to a felony.

I can't find the original 60 Minutes video, but here's a partial transcript of the episode (search for the word "batteries"):

https://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=JUSTWATCH-L;16e9e...

And a book that recounts the same incident. The author is a Senior Fellow in Criminal Justice at the University of Southern California, so I assume he knows what he's talking about and has checked the accuracy of the story.

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=8356210389&...

And someone's letter to the Governor of California with a list of three strike convictions, a number of which are not felonies:

http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-39951.h...

Actually, your transcript refers to a provision which elevates any theft (not any crime), with a prior theft, to a felony. This is a separate rule that predates and operates separately from the three-strikes law. (Though, obviously, before the reform to three strikes requiring the third felony to be violent or serious, had an interaction with it: but the conviction was, itself, a felony independently of the three-strikes law.)

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