Today is Question Three of my quiz revealing the hidden details of the absurd initiative to gut the Three Strikes law.

Question One showed how a serial murderer such as the “Night Stalker” can slaughter 13 people — and the amended law will treat him as having only one strike on his record. Question Two showed that Charlie Manson (a man with nine murder convictions) could be paroled, break into your house, order the slaughter of your pet, and threaten to kill you — and end up serving fewer than five actual years in prison under the amended law.

In response, some complained that I was giving examples of people who are so awful that they would never be released from prison anyway. To which my response is: if these mass murderers couldn’t be treated as third-strikers under the amended law, who could?

In Question Three, I will answer these comments more directly, with a real-life example of somebody who committed many horrible crimes and was let out of prison. I will show you how the current law would protect us from such a person, and how the law as amended would likely fail in this basic duty. Finally, I will reveal who this person is. It’s kind of a Paul Harvey segment, only about a vicious criminal.

Question Three:

Our not-so-hypothetical individual suffered a string of arrests for various crimes over the course of several years. His record includes juvenile arrests for burglary, forgery, and motorcycle theft. As an adult, he was arrested for grand theft, public drunkenness, resisting arrest, illegal possession of alcohol, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, trespassing, auto theft, and possession of marijuana. He never served more than one year for any of these crimes.

Now the violence begins.

Within two months of being paroled, defendant abducted a 26-year-old legal secretary and attempted to sexually assault her. She escaped, and defendant was arrested. Defendant faked a suicide attempt and thereby gained admission to a state hospital, from which he escaped. He then went on a four-day crime spree. He broke into the home of a nurse at the state hospital, and beat her on the head with a fire poker. He burglarized an animal shelter and stole a shotgun, which he used to try to kidnap a female bartender, who escaped. He broke into the home of a bank employee, and was arrested while hiding outside that home.

Defendant was sentenced to concurrent terms of 1-to-25 years for the various crimes committed during his crime spree. After serving less than five years of his 1-to-25 year sentence, defendant was again paroled. Within two years, he and an accomplice kidnapped a woman, robbing $6000 from her. (They also committed robberies at a bank, a store, and a restaurant — but authorities did not learn about these crimes until years later.) Defendant received a 16-year sentence for the kidnapping.

All of this took place before the passage of the Three Strikes law. Your quiz question is: at the time he was sentenced for the last kidnapping charge, was the defendant eligible for a life sentence under the Three Strikes law:

a) as currently written?

b) as likely to be amended in November?

Well, you probably guessed the answer:

a) Under current law, defendant would certainly be sentenced to a life term for the kidnapping. He has too many strikes to count. His adult convictions for residential burglary all count as strikes, as do any charges for assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, or robbery. He probably would have received a life sentence before the kidnapping. Certainly, by the time he is sentenced on his last kidnapping case, he would receive a 25-to-life prison term.

b) Under the proposed amendments to the Three Strikes law, defendant may still be ineligible for a 25-to-life sentence. The answer depends upon whether his 1-to-25 year sentence was imposed for criminal charges that were “brought and tried separately.” The charges may well have been consolidated in one case — a perfectly reasonable scenario given that the various violent crimes were committed in a single four-day crime spree after an escape from custody. If so, then defendant would have received only one strike for those offenses, and would never have been subject to a life sentence under the Three Strikes Law as it is likely to be amended in November.

I remind you that we are talking about a real-life person. It is simply not clear from the information I have seen whether the 1-to-25 sentence was imposed for crimes “brought and tried separately.”

But, of course, it shouldn’t matter. The idea that it makes a difference whether these charges were “brought and tried separately” is completely insane. But then, so is the idea that 13 separate murders committed by the Night Stalker can be treated as only one strike prior.

Let’s get back to real life. What happened?

Well, after serving half of his 16-year sentence for kidnapping, the defendant got out and kidnapped a little girl from a slumber party in Petaluma, California. That girl’s name was Polly Klaas, and he killed her.

The defendant’s name was Richard Allen Davis — the man whose unbelievable history of escaping serious consequences for his violent conduct was the reason that the Three Strikes Law was passed to begin with. A man who might never have been eligible for a life sentence under the watered-down version of the law expected to pass in November.

And now you know . . . the rest of the story.

But the voting public doesn’t.

It’s our job to make sure they find out in time.

Coming tomorrow:

Only you can prevent the setting of forest fires from being reclassified as a non-strike.