11th-hour attempt overturns Prop 66

The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's l1th-hour blitz against Proposition 66 was single-handedly responsible for defeating the initiative that would have softened California's three-strikes sentencing law, pollsters, analysts and campaign insiders said Wednesday.

Polls were showing nearly two-thirds were favoring the initiative before Schwarzenegger, in the campaign's final week, began railing against Proposition 66 in television ads and appearances. As Schwarzenegger went into overdrive five days before the vote, the popular Field Poll was showing a dead heat.

The measure eventually failed, garnering 47 percent, in what pollsters said was the biggest and fastest California electoral flip-flop in memory.

"I can't recall one that turned this big and fast over such a short period of time," said Mark DiCamillo, the Field Poll director.

Proposition 66 opponent Marc Klaas, whose young daughter's kidnapping spurred California voters in 1994 to approve the three strikes law Proposition 66 sought to weaken, said the governor "is definitely the angel in this whole thing."

Backed by billionaire-investor George Soros and a Sacramento insurance magnate and others who doled out $5 million, Proposition 66 would have altered the original three strikes law by limiting the crimes triggering "third strike" life sentences.

Most major newspapers in the state editorialized in favor of Proposition 66, saying its passage would stop judges from issuing life terms for shoplifters. Schwarzenegger said the measure would flood the streets with dangerous criminals.

Proposition 66 would have limited "strikes" to violent and serious felonies-- a change that would have retroactively reduced the sentences of about 4,000 prisoners now serving mandatory life terms for nonviolent or less-serious third strikes.

The 1994 law mandated 25-year-to-life sentences in most cases for offenders with two previous convictions for serious or violent felonies, even when the third felony is nonviolent or relatively minor.

Schwarzenegger also seized on ambiguity in the ballot measure's text. He said 26,000 convicts would be released from prison, an assertion proponents labeled as scare tactics.

Criminal defense attorneys, however, were preparing to assert such claims in court if Proposition 66 passed.