Rachel McGrath. Correspondent
Ventura County Star (California)
A retired Los Angeles County judge addressed criminal justice students at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday, telling them it will be up to them to fix a “broken system.”
As evidence, Lonzo Lucas cited statistics showing the state’s prison population rose from 25,000 in 1980 to 170,000 in 2007, and it continues to climb.
“You can live with it or change it,” Lucas told the students. “Changing the system will create a better world.”
A former deputy public defender, Lucas operated a private law practice for 15 years before being appointed to the bench as a court commissioner, or judge, in the South Gate Municipal Court in Los Angeles County in 1995.
He retired from the bench in 2003 as a commissioner in the Los Angeles County Superior Court. He is on the faculty of the California Judicial College in Berkeley, assisting in the training of new judges.
Lucas, whose niece Schannae Lucas is an assistant professor of criminal justice at CLU, was invited to speak to students on the topic of “Probation, Sentencing Law, and Policies and Practices in the State of California.”
In recalling his days on the bench, Lucas said he was known among his peers as “the hammer” because he was willing to impose tough sentences. Even so, he said, California sends too many people to prison who don’t need to be there and for whom other forms of punishment or rehabilitation might be more appropriate.
“Uniformity of sentencing is where the system is running into trouble,” he said.
The state Penal Code allows a judge to impose one of three precise terms of imprisonment for a felony offense - a lower, middle or upper term, he said. A judge can take into account a defendant’s criminal history, the severity of the offense and other factors, he told the students.
Those guidelines, he said, were recently challenged in a case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court by John Cunningham, who was convicted of molesting a child and was sentenced to the upper term of imprisonment for the offense.
In Cunningham v. California, 2007, the Supreme Court reversed Cunningham’s sentence, finding that California’s sentencing law allowed judges to find facts on which to base their elevation of sentences, violating a defendant’s constitutional rights to a trial by jury.
In response to a question, Lucas suggested that one way of improving the system would be to create a state sentencing commission.
Afterward, student Deanna Rodriguez, 24, of Thousand Oaks, said she liked the idea of a sentencing commission.
“A commission would make sure the law was applied more evenly, and that was one of the things he said that stuck with me,” she said.
“He kind of opened my eyes to what’s going on in the system,” said student Dennis Clay, 18, from San Diego.
Copyright 2009 Ventura County Star