The first time I met Mark, I did not know what to expect. In 1997, a judge decided Mark would never change and sentenced him to life in prison. My partner, Josh Weddle, and I, students in Stanford Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic, are appealing his sentence. As we walked through the prison’s sterile walls to meet Mark for the first time in March, I feared a hardened criminal suspicious of a couple of “suits” in their 20s.

Mark has been in prison for 14 years for shoplifting a tool and costume jewelry. Had this been his first crime, his maximum penalty would have been $1,000 and six months in jail. Instead, because he had committed two burglaries a dozen years earlier, when he was 19 years old, he may be in prison for life.

California’s unforgiving penal code allowed a prosecutor to elevate Mark’s petty theft from a misdemeanor to a felony. Petty theft and two burglaries allowed the judge to impose a life sentence under California’s “three strikes” law.

In other words, Mark received effectively the harshest criminal penalty in California – capital punishment is possible but almost never carried out – because one evening, self-medicating for a mental illness, he stole a tool and costume jewelry.

Stanford Law’s clinic is devoted full time to representing individuals serving life sentences for petty crimes under the repeat-offender law. Students who had never litigated a case or filed a brief in court have helped free almost a dozen people who would have spent most of their lives in prison. The clinic’s clients who have been freed have treated their mental illnesses, participated in drug rehabilitation, found employment, reunited with their families and stayed crime free.

The clinic has been my most rewarding – and most draining – law school experience. I thought it would be a good opportunity to gain practical legal skills, but the best part has been the passion from doing what is just and working to change someone’s fate. I spend hours on the phone or traveling to meet Mark, his family, prison officials, attorneys, courts, psychiatrists and others, leaving countless messages to get information. My partner and I pore over documents so that we can look a judge in the eye one day and say that sentencing our client to life in prison was a mistake, that, as we sadly discovered, he has been mentally ill and untreated for years, that he suffered awful abuse and trauma and deserves a chance at treatment, rehabilitation and freedom.

When I met Mark, he was not what I imagined a “lifer” would be. He is soft spoken and gentle. He is worn down from years behind bars, yet hopeful and optimistic. He trusted us like lifelong confidants as we asked him about the most intimate details of his life, questions he was never asked before.

Last week, outgoing U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Society changes. Knowledge accumulates. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes.” Mark has learned from his, and I hope California, where thousands of individuals who never committed a violent crime expect to spend their lives behind bars, does too.

Peter Mandel is a second-year student at Stanford Law School. The Criminal Defense Clinic, the only legal organization in the country devoted to representing individuals serving life imprisonment under California’s “three strikes” law, represents defendants charged under that law with minor, nonviolent felonies.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/27/EDR71DKIK2.DTLThis article appeared on page A – 16 of the San Francisco Chronicle