A Three-Strikes Law Made Fairer in California California's voters softened one of the nation's most destructive and unfair sentencing policies this week when they approved a ballot initiative revising the infamous three-strikes law of 1994, which imposes a life sentence for any felony conviction - no matter how minor - if the defendant has two previous serious convictions. The revised law imposes a life sentence only when the third felony conviction is serious or violent. It also authorizes the courts to resentence thousands of three-strikers whose third offenses were not violent or serious, as long as they do not pose a serious risk to public safety. The three-strikes law epitomized the mass-imprisonment fever that swept the nation in recent decades. Soaring prison costs and overcrowding have been particularly acute in California, which is currently under a federal court order to cut its prison population, and where three-strikes cases account for about a quarter of all inmates. Many elected officials have long understood that this law was unjust and that it had no real impact on crime. Even so, few of them spoke out publicly for reform, fearing that they would be turned out of office by law-and-order voters. An exception was the Los Angeles County district attorney, Steve Cooley, a Republican, who criticized the law when he ran for office in 2000. Once elected, he made it a matter of policy to invoke the law carefully so as to avoid "disproportionately harsh sentences for relatively minor crimes." It was too long in coming, but California's voters have at last improved a law that was not only financially burdensome but grossly unfair.