On a sunny afternoon in September 1986, “N”, his young son, and his father, “L”, went camping in Tennessee.
The gentle autumn breeze and the flickering sunlight through the red and gold leaves provided relief from the hostilities and threats that N endured before parting ways with her husband, “D”. The peace did not last long. Just as N’s tension subsided and she began to enjoy the weekend, D drove to camp. Before N could catch up with her son, D dragged her to his car. He restrained her with one arm and shot her father in the chest. With N already in the car, D loaded his son into the car and sped out of the camp. The witnesses called the police.
While speeding around a corner, D lost control of the car and crashed into a retaining wall. N tried to get out of the car, holding her young son with one arm and pulling the handle with the other. D pulled his son off his arm and pointed a pistol at the boy’s head. Hysterical, bleeding from the head and desperate to save her son, N staggered forward in an attempt to push her son away. D fired at her, but missed when N ducked. As N watched in horror, D put his hands around the boy’s throat and began to strangle him to death. The police intervened in time.
D was sentenced to 45 years of which he served eight. Two years after his release, while still on parole, D murdered his new fiancée, repeatedly stabbing her with a knife in the parking lot of the local Taco Bell. His 15-year-old daughter was a witness to the murder. He was sentenced to death in 1997.
Timing is everything when convicted of murder
The sentence has to do with the opportune moment. The guidelines change, and with it, so do prison sentences. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who tried to assassinate the presidency, were sentenced to life in prison in 1975. Wouldn’t anyone have thought that these two women would receive a “get out of jail free” card before dying in prison? However, Moore was released from federal prison on December 31, 2007, the only person at that time to be released who attempted to assassinate a president of the United States. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a 60-year-old member of the Manson family, was discharged from Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth after 34 years. In 1975, federal guidelines allowed 30 years to be a life sentence and that inmates can be paroled after serving their sentence if they have a record of good behavior.
All of that changed in 1984 for those charged with a federal crime.
“The Sentencing Reform Act would have made it nearly impossible for a federally sentenced criminal serving a life sentence to obtain parole,” said Colin Cooper, a criminal defense attorney from Berkeley, CA. “It’s always up to the parole board, but there wouldn’t be a mandatory 30-year limit.”
States were undergoing their own reforms before the “Three Strikes” law. In Tennessee, two reforms got D out of the 50-year sentence in eight years.
In 1985, the year before D’s arrest in Tennessee, the state allowed sentencing credits to come out of both the parole eligibility date and the expiration date. These credits were known as “prisoner performance credits” and could reduce the sentence by up to fifteen days a month; in 1988 this increased to sixteen days per month. California’s Three Strikes Act that began in 1994 has had a profound effect on sentences overall, keeping people in prison for much longer. “Any criminal sentence, whether for a first, second or third, is much stricter now,” according to Cooper.
This is now, but that was then
When Phillip Craig Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in prison in 1977 for kidnapping a South Lake Tahoe young woman in order to rape her, former federal prosecutor Leland Lufty, the former federal prosecutor in Reno who won the 1977 conviction against Garrido, believed that he would be locked up forever. However, the Sentences Reform Law was still years away and Garrido knew how to play with the system.
In California, 10 percent of those on parole or parole simply disappear compared to just 3 percent of those released on private bonds, according to the U.S. National Center for Policy Analysis, June From 2000.
A 2000 study by the Dept. of Justice reported that 15 murders a day are committed by people already on parole and that 53 percent of inmates were on parole or parole when they were arrested again.