TWENTY-EIGHT TO LIFE FOR FAILURE TO REGISTER

In People v. Nichols the California Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District upheld a 28 years to life sentence for failure to register as a sex offender within five days of moving. Under the state’s Three Strike law David Allen Nichols was sentenced to 25 years of life for failing to register and an addition three years for three prison priors.

Despite appellate counsel’s inventiveness in raising insufficiency of the evidence, challenges to the trial court’s admission of evidence, cruel and unusual punishment and the refusal of the trial court to to dismiss the three strike allegations the Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s decision.

It found that there was no Romero error in the trial court’s refusal to strike the three strikes allegation since the trial court did not abuse its discretion in that Nichols deliberately violated the law by not registering his current address and by absconding from parole. In light of his prior crimes (robbery, bank robbery and oral copulation) he is a danger to society and his failure to register puts him within the spirit of the Three Strikes law and therefore the trial judge acted rationally and within the spirit of the Three Strikes law.

But putting Nichols away for 28 years to life, and in California with it’s reluctance to parole people it is a life sentence, really necessary considering that there are 150,000 prisoners in prisons built for 80,000 people. The Federal courts have ordered that California reduce its prison population by 40,000 in the next two years because the state cannot afford to provide medical care for 150,000 prisoners and it is cruel and unusual punishment to keep human beings in prison without reasonable medical care. The State has a 27 billion dollar deficit and is looking for ways to cut expenditure and it has no facilities or money to properly increase the prison medical budget. As the Federal courts have pointed out the lack of reasonable medical has led to the unnecessary deaths of all too many people in the California prisons and rulings like that in Nichols while legally justifiable will only lead to more deaths unless something is done to ameliorate the overcrowding of California prisons.