Scoff Law

Sgt. Eric Greenwell, sitting in a coffeehouse on Main Street, keeps glancing over a reporter's shoulder to scan every face that enters the place, like he's looking for someone. But it's a person he recently caught whom he's here to talk about.

For two months last fall, the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department's Career Criminal Squad, which Greenwell oversees, had searched for a notorious house burglar named Kevin Givens. Two of Greenwell's detectives, James Herrington and Richard Marquez, had been following Givens' trail for weeks, surveilling neighborhoods south of the Plaza and west of Rockhill, driving with their headlights dimmed on the lookout for the career burglar. They suspected Givens in several break-ins in the area but were waiting for more evidence to tie him to a crime.

It was a patrol officer who finally nabbed their quarry. On November 16, a patrolman spotted Givens carrying a television out of a house on 74th Street. Givens dropped the TV and sprinted, but the 41-year-old suspect was nabbed a few blocks away. His 1992 Ford F-150 pickup truck, meanwhile, turned out to have several stolen firearms piled in its bed.

Relaxing his broad shoulders and leaning back in his chair, Greenwell says confidently, "I will be retired the next time Kevin Givens commits another crime."

Since the mid-1980s, Givens has tallied at least a dozen felonies in Missouri and Kansas -- stealing cars, burglarizing homes, forging signatures on stolen checks. Yet despite his lengthy record, he was never sentenced to longer than seven years in prison and usually served far less.

Out of the lockup most recently since last March, Givens had continued his habit of entering other people's homes. But this time, caught with a truck bed stacked with shotguns and other weapons, Givens is in a world of hurt. It's a federal crime for a felon to possess a gun, and Givens faces much stiffer penalties in a district where U.S. Attorney Todd Graves has put special emphasis on putting away felons caught with firearms.

Givens may finally go away for a very long time.

Of course, if he'd been breaking into houses in California with the same kind of arrest record, he'd long ago have risked being put away as a lifer. Under the state's "Three Strikes" law, a repeat offender like Givens faces a sentence of 25 years to life after his third felony.

Since passage of California's notorious law in 1994, its guidelines have been relaxed in some ways, but it's still so harsh that many of the state's citizens have spoken out against it. In November, more than 5 million Californians voted to weaken the statute but failed to gain a majority.

That kind of opposition has been mobilized by stories such as that of Leandro Andrade, a California man who is serving two sentences of 25 years to life for stealing nine videotapes in 1995. He smuggled copies of Snow White and Cinderella out of two Kmart stores for his nieces as Christmas presents. But with two prior convictions for home burglaries committed more than 20 years earlier, his petty theft of the tapes was treated like a felony and became his third and fourth strikes. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the sentence. Andrade won't be eligible for parole until he's 87.

Now that's harsh punishment.

Missouri and Kansas don't need new sentencing laws that could put away a person for life for stealing a few videotapes. But does the long career of a serial criminal like Givens suggest that local sentencing practices are too lenient?

A three-strikes rule that puts a nonviolent offender away for life may be beyond the pale.

But what about a ten-strikes rule? Is that so unreasonable?

Strike 1. A man returning from work in December 1984 arrives at his house on East 54th Street to find it ransacked. Two televisions, stereo equipment, a microwave oven and other items are missing. Police lift fingerprints and find a match that points to Kevin Givens, who had been fingerprinted earlier for juvenile offenses, including possessing alcohol as a minor. It's his first adult crime, and after he's taken into custody, he writes a three-page statement admitting his role in the burglary. But he also implicates a friend, Eric Walker, and Givens is spared prison time, sentenced by Judge Rosa Tillman to 24 months' probation on a reduced charge of trespassing. He is ordered to pay the homeowner restitution for the stolen items. (There's no record of whether he did so.) He is 21 years old.

Missouri Supreme Court Judge Mike Wolff says Kevin Givens is an anomaly. Wolff, chairman of the state Sentencing Advisory Commission studying trends in Missouri sentencing, says the majority of people sent to prison don't go back after they're released.

"One of the things you try to do in any type of sentencing scheme is to save your prison space for people who are violent or harmful," Wolff says. Those who are sent away should be rehabilitated, not thrown away, he adds. According to the Missouri Department of Corrections, 72 percent of released convicts never return to prison.

Most felons make the best of their second chances, Wolff says. "You have the unusual case like him [Givens]. But you don't make your whole set of rules geared around your worst people. You gear them toward the norm."