Police1 notes that each agency should monitor cases like this in their state as it could have a dramatic effect on criminal activity. As statistics have shown, crime has decreased in previous years for various reasons. If this ruling is overturned, law enforcement can expect to see an increase of crime in their jurisdiction and more hardened criminals on the street.
By Jeffrey Collins / Associated Press
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Two armed robberies that authorities say pocketed James McGee a total of $268 have cost him life in prison.
Now the 32-year-old Army veteran is appealing his case to the South Carolina Supreme Court, saying the state’s “two strikes and your out” law that resulted in his life sentence without parole is too harsh. Justices will hear the case Wednesday.
But even the assistant director of a national group urging states to reconsider the two- and three-strikes law figures the latest challenge in South Carolina is an uphill climb.
“Roughly half the states across the country enacted some type of three-strikes law around 1994, 1995,” said Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project. “Since then, there has been virtually no activity. No new states joining the list, and no other states getting rid of the law.”
California’s three-strikes law is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, and plenty of states have upheld the laws in their own highest courts, Mauer said. South Carolina has a two- and three-strikes law that is one of the “harshest sentencing schemes in the United States,” McGee’s attorney Tara Taggart wrote in her brief. She refuses to talk about the case now.
McGee’s first strike was the 1993 armed robbery of a gas station in Easley where he stole $72, according to court records. For that, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
His second strike came in February 2001 when McGee was convicted of robbing a motel with a BB gun and running away with $192.
Two-strike offenses are called “most serious” offenses in South Carolina law and include murder, rape, kidnapping and armed robbery among others.
Three-strike, or simply “serious,” offenses include second-degree burglary, insurance fraud and some drug offenses.
Defendants who run afoul of either statute must be sentenced to life in jail without parole.
“I think it has been a very important tool in fighting crime in South Carolina,” Attorney General Charlie Condon said. “We’ve had some very strong reductions in our violent crime rate in the past few years. I think the message is very clear: This law works.”
The two-pronged law took effect in 1996. Condon’s spokesman Robb McBurney said the attorney general’s office doesn’t keep figures on how many people have been sentenced under the tougher law, but a report by The Sentencing Project estimates 14 inmates were serving life sentences by mid-1998 because they ran out of strikes.
In the four years since that report, prosecutors say they have seen a marked increase in the number of mandatory life sentences handed down.
McGee and his lawyer chose to have a bench trial and let a judge determine his guilt or innocence so the case could be appealed more quickly.
Only two witnesses testified at McGee’s one-day trial in August 2001. The motel clerk said she saw a car circle her office several times before a man came in, told her he had a gun and demanded money.
Then an investigator testified that McGee gave a two-page statement admitting to several armed robberies in the area including the motel robbery. He was never tried for the other crimes.
After Circuit Judge C. Victor Pyle found him guilty, McGee apologized and asked for mercy, saying a sentence of life in prison without parole amounted to execution by old age.
“Your honor, I made a lot of mistakes in my time. I admit that freely,” McGee said, according to the transcript of the trial. “But, I mean, am I so terrible of a person that I have to be put to death slowly?”
“I can’t give that to you, Mr. McGee,” Pyle said. “The Legislature has passed this law which provides a mandatory sentence if you have a prior record so the only other recourse you have, of course, is to appeal it.”
In McGee’s appeal documents, Taggart argues the clerk didn’t positively identify McGee at the trial. She also notes that McGee’s co-defendant, who drove the getaway car, received a 15-year sentence.
Condon’s office said the two- and three-strikes law does not prevent prosecutors from accepting plea bargains to allow defendants to avoid mandatory life sentences.
“The typical victims of crimes like this is a single mom trying to make ends meet at a lower paying job,” said Condon, who supported the law during his first campaign for attorney general in 1994. “She has a right to be perfectly safe where she works.”
Condon said people fighting the law are going the wrong direction since federal and state courts have given lawmakers broad discretion to set minimum and maximum sentences for crimes.
“The remedy is go to the General Assembly of South Carolina and ask them to change the law,” Condon said. “But I’m not holding my breath on that one.”