Shoplifter Gets 25-To-Life
The 25-years-to-life prison sentence of a Los Angeles shoplifter suffering from paranoid schizophrenia has been upheld by a federal appeals court.
In a 2-1 decision, a three-justice panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant habeas corpus relief to Cornel Ray Joshua, who had been convicted of shoplifting $62 of liquor from a store. By a writ of habeas corpus, a defendant can ask a court to review the constitutionality of the circumstances of his imprisonment. Joshua is currently confined at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
Joshua’s attorneys argued unsuccessfully that his sentence violated the prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment set out in the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Case decisions applying that provision have held it means that punishment not only cannot be barbaric, it also cannot be severely disproportionate to the crime for which it is imposed. The lawyers pointed out that businessman Jeffrey Skilling, who was convicted of fraud in a $63 billion case, was sentenced to virtually the same punishment.
Joshua’s long prison sentence was mandated under California’s “Three Strikes” law, which imposes it on three-time offenders of certain crimes - usually deemed “serious or violent” offenses. The law was intended to be applied to rapists, robbers, and gangsters, but relatively minor offenders have sometimes been sentenced under it, as well. In order to trigger the Three-Strikes law, prosecutors often will charge a shoplifter with burglary, rather than petty theft, arguing that the defendant entered a structure - the store, with intent to commit a crime, thereby committing the legal definition of burglary. (Joshua v. Adams, 2007)