Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO, California, Sep 14 2006 (IPS) — A California immigrant serving a life sentence for lying to the Department of Motor Vehicles got a day in court Wednesday. Santos Reyes has already served six years for that crime, which he has never denied.

“They were trying to get a driver’s license for his cousin but his cousin can’t read,” said Peter Camejo, the Green Party candidate for California governor and a spokesman for the campaign to free Reyes. “The crime that Santos did was to take the written test for his cousin and he got caught doing it.”

“They got suspicious and they started asking him questions, so he just admitted it,” Camejo told IPS. “He said he was just trying to get a driver’s license for his cousin because they need it for work to feed his family. So they called the police and the police arrested him.”

When they took Reyes to jail, the police found he had been convicted of felonies twice before. In 1981, at age 17, he was convicted of stealing a radio. Five years later he was convicted of robbery. He then had no offenses for the next 11 years, a period in which he gained employment as a roofer, got married and fathered two children.

But as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, he couldn’t drive legally and neither could his cousin.

“He had a criminal record so to try to get [even] a fake driver’s license under his name was very difficult,” Camejo said. “There are many tricks that people use to get driver’s licenses. You understand what happens if the police catch you driving illegally. They take your car and it’s not returned to you. The state sells it and keeps the money. It’s a form of robbery.”

California has the toughest “three strikes” law in the nation. And under the terms of the law, everyone convicted of a third felony – no matter what kind – serves a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life. According to the group Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes (FACTS), 4,500 California prisoners are currently serving life sentences for crimes as minor as stealing a slice of pizza.

Dororthy Erskine, 72, turned out for Reyes’ hearing in Los Angeles Wednesday. Her nephew is currently serving a life sentence for aiding and abetting shoplifting.

“He was a cocaine addict and this led to his criminal activity,” she said. “In 1994, he was in a mall in Cerritos (outside Los Angeles) and these two women were on the same floor as him taking sheets and they stopped him when he left the store. Even though he didn’t have any merchandise from the store he was arrested for aiding and abetting shoplifting and he has been in prison ever since.”

The severity of California’s three strikes law makes it unlikely Santos Reyes will be freed by judicial order. While the Third District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles agreed to hear the case, Reyes’s legal team believes their best hope lies in convincing California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to commute his sentence to time served.

At the same time, FACTS wants to change California’s three strikes law so that only serious or violent felonies can send criminals to prison for life. Opponents of the three strikes law also argue for changes in immigration law so that undocumented immigrants like Santos Reyes don’t have to lie to get a driver’s license.

But the backlash has been strong to such proposals. In 2003, former Hollywood actor Schwarzenegger ousted incumbent Democrat Gray Davis pledging to revoke driver’s license privileges for undocumented immigrants. In 2004, the state of Arizona passed Proposition 200, which barred all state services for undocumented immigrants. This November, Arizona voters will consider a proposition forbidding judges to grant bail to the undocumented.

Moreover, on Tuesday, anti-immigrant crusader Randy Graf won a hotly contested Congressional primary battle with the help of the Minutemen, vigilantes who have begun to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We know that large numbers of people who are coming to this country lately are not just immigrants looking for a job,” Graf told IPS after winning the Republican nomination for an Arizona House district that includes the city of Tuscon.

“The crime rate and statistics along the border around here and in Texas with drug smuggling all bring us to the same conclusion that we need to secure the border and stop this invasion,” he said.

Despite the backlash, immigrants and their allies are optimistic about success in the future. The national Republican Party spent 122,000 dollars to support Graf’s opponent, fearing a Graf win would push a growing population of Latino voters away from voting for Republicans. After California passed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994, Latino voter registration soared – their votes have helped put California firmly in the Democratic column.