Excessive sentencing
Sentences that bear no relation to what was done, handed down because a statute left no one any discretion.
Habitual offender statutes — "three strikes" laws — were written to incapacitate the dangerous. In practice they catch people whose records are made of poverty offences, and they remove the judge's power to say so. Alabama's is among the harshest: more than five hundred people are serving life without the possibility of parole there for offences that killed no one.
We work on these sentences one case at a time and as a class. Individual relief — clemency, parole eligibility, resentencing — is what gets a particular person home. Changing the statute is what reaches everyone still inside. Neither substitutes for the other, and we do not pretend the constitutional route is easy: the Supreme Court has upheld sentences of this kind before.
Campaigns in this area
Working on this already? Tell us where — we would rather connect you to people doing the same thing than start something parallel.