A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?
My thoughts on the best and the worst:<p>> Anthony Jackson has a sixth-grade education and worked as a cook. He was convicted of burglary for stealing a wallet from a Myrtle Beach hotel room when he was 44 years old. According to prosecutors, he woke two vacationing golfers as he entered the room and stole a wallet, then pretended to be a security guard and ran away. Police arrested him when he tried to use the stolen credit card at a pancake house. [...] <i>Because of two prior convictions for burglary</i>, Jackson was sentenced to mandatory life without parole under South Carolina's three-strikes law.<p>Emphasis mine.  I can't get too worked up about a system that sentences this guy to life in prison.  What would be the point of letting him out?  He knew he wasn't supposed to walk into other people's hotel rooms and take their wallets.  At what point does society get to tell people "you know what, knock it off"?<p>> After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight, Aaron Jones turned his life around. He earned an electrical technician degree, married, became an ordained reverend, and founded the Perfect Love Outreach Ministry. Years later, Aaron was hired to renovate a motel in Florida, and was living in an employee-sponsored apartment with two other workers, one of whom had a truck that was used as a company vehicle by all the co-workers. Jones decided to drive this truck home to Louisiana to visit his wife and four children. When Aaron's co-worker woke up to find his truck missing, he reported it stolen. Aaron was pulled over by police while driving the truck.<p>I don't understand this one at all.  Shouldn't the truck owner have testified on his behalf?  Declined to press charges?<p>I made a cursory effort to look up the case itself, but I have no idea how to do that.