San FranciscoChronicle - Saturday, April 24, 2004
Bob Egelko, Staff Writer

Delbert Meeks had "a long and serious criminal history," which included convictions for rape and attempted rape, when he violated a law that was intended to let authorities keep track of dangerous sex criminals, said the Court of Appeal in Sacramento in a 2-1 decision April 13.

Dissenting Justice Richard Sims was outraged.

"What has become of our society?" he asked in his dissent. "Why has 'compassion' become a dirty word in the law? I think that some years from now, law professors and law students will read this case and will ask, 'What on earth were they thinking?' "

Meeks' lawyer, Robert Wayne Gehring, said Friday he planned to appeal. "This offense did not involve any violence, damage or theft of property" and would not have been charged as a third strike in some counties, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, he said.

Deputy Attorney General Janet Neeley said that Meeks was legally convicted and that Sims' real complaint appeared to be with the scope of the three-strikes law.

Meeks' case, and the April 19 case of a shoplifter whose 25-years-to-life sentence was overturned by a federal appeals court, may become part of the debate over an initiative that is expected to be on the November state ballot. It would narrow the 1994 three-strikes law by increasing sentences only for criminals whose latest offense is either serious or violent.

The law, the toughest in the nation for repeat felons, classifies a long list of serious or violent crimes as "strikes." A criminal with one strike who commits any new felony must be sentenced to twice the usual prison term; someone with two strikes who commits a felony faces a life term, with no parole for at least 25 years.

State prison records show that more than half the 7,200 inmates now serving 25 to life under the law were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including burglary, drug offenses and shoplifting, as their third strike. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that a 50-to-life sentence for a Southern California man convicted of two thefts of videotapes, after a long series of nonviolent offenses, did not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Meeks, now 52, was first sentenced to prison for burglary at 18 and had convictions for rape in 1975 and attempted rape in 1982. His last felony conviction before the current case was for a 1991 robbery.

Diagnosed HIV-positive in 1996 and with hepatitis C in 1997, he had AIDS when he was arrested in May 2000 for failing to register as a sex offender within five days of changing his address and within five days of his birthday. He had last registered in 1997.

Meeks had spent most of the year before his arrest living on the street, moved in with his sister-in-law in Sacramento in February or March 2000, and testified that he knew of the registration requirement but was depressed and thinking of "nothing else except for the disease."

The appeals court said Meeks had "dedicated himself to a life of crime" and was being punished for continually flouting the law. His "willingness to ignore his duty to register and thus ignore society's right to maintain some control over sexual offenders" is at least as serious a crime as the thefts for which the Supreme Court upheld three-strikes sentences last year, the court said.

Meeks' sentence "does not shock the conscience or offend fundamental notions of human dignity," wrote Justice Harry Hull, joined in the majority by Justice Fred Morrison.

Sims, in dissent, called the case "pathetic" and said neither Meeks' "old and stale" felony convictions nor his new offense justified a third- strike sentence.

"What are we doing sending this dying man to state prison for 27 years to life?" he asked.

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

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