News Jaya

Three strikes law

I have one of my answers on the three strikes law if professor Greg Newbold is correct.

An offender who committed two assaults and a murder - in that order - would be locked up for life, because the maximum sentence for murder was life imprisonment.

But the new law would mean that someone who committed murder and then two assaults would only serve the maximum penalty for assault, a sentence length that varies depending on the attack and not a life sentence.

If you're doing life without parole, why wouldn't you kill a prison officer? What's to stop you? What would you lose by killing a prison officer?"

If this is correct, the message for criminals is this: Make sure you do your worst crimes first. The message for prison guards is this: be wary of those who do their crimes in the other order.

The Herald has also said that this law is backed up by empirical evidence from the US which found that homicide rates increased in cities with "three strikes" laws when compared with those without such laws. Yet in some of these states, these "strikes" are for minor offences, like shoplifting, quite different to what is being proposed here.