David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

later.
    “Father-daughter relationships are kind of a real special thing,” Mike Reynolds said not long ago, looking back on that awful night. He is an older man now. He limps and has lost most of his hair. He sat at a table in his study, in his rambling Mission-style home in Fresno not more than a five-minute drive from the street where his daughter was shot. On the wall behind him was a photograph of Kimber. In the kitchen, next door, was a painting of Kimber with angel’s wings, ascending to heaven. “You may fight with your wife,” he went on, his voice filled with the emotion of the memory. “But your daughter is kind of like the princess—she can do no wrong. And for that matter, her dad is the guy who can fix anything, from a broken tricycle to a broken heart. Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn’t fix. I literally held her hand while she was dying. It’s a very helpless feeling.” At that moment, he made a vow.
    “Everything I’ve done ever since is about a promise I made to Kimber on her deathbed,” Reynolds said. “I can’t save your life. But I’m going to do everything in my power to try and prevent this from happening to anybody else.”

2.
    When Reynolds came home from the hospital, he got a call from Ray Appleton, the host of a popular Fresno talk-radio show. “The town was going berserk,” Appleton remembers. “At the time, Fresno was number one in the country in per capita murders—or close to it. But this was just so blatant—in front of a million people, in front of a popular restaurant. I got the word late that night that Kimber had died, and I got hold of Mike. I said, ‘Whenever you are ready to come on, let me know.’ And he said, ‘How about today?’ That’s where this whole thing began, fourteen hours after his daughter’s death.”
    Reynolds describes the two hours he spent on the Appleton show as the most difficult of his life. He was in tears. “I’ve never seen devastation like that before,” Appleton remembers. In the beginning, the two took calls from people who knew the Reynolds family, or who just wanted to express their sympathy. But then he and Reynolds began to talk about what the murder said about California’s justice system, and calls started coming in from clear across the state.
    Reynolds went back home and called a meeting. He invited everyone he thought could make a difference, and they sat in his backyard around a long wooden table next to his outdoor barbecue. “We had three judges, people from the police department, lawyers, the sheriff, people from the district attorney’s office, people from the community, the school system,” he said. “And we were asking, ‘Why is this happening? What’s causing it?’”
    Their conclusion was that in California the penalties associated with breaking the law were too low. Parole was being granted too easily and too quickly. Chronic offenders were being treated no differently than people who were committing crimes for the first time. Douglas Walker, the man on the back of the motorcycle, had his first run-in with the law when he was thirteen years old for trafficking heroin. He had recently been given a temporary release so he could visit his pregnant wife, and he had never returned. Did that make sense?
    The group put together a proposal. At Reynolds’s insistence, it was short and simple, written in laymen’s language. It became known as the Three Strikes Law. Anyone convicted of a second serious or criminal offense in California, it stated, would have to serve double the sentence currently on the books. And anyone convicted of a third offense—and the definition of a third offense included every crime imaginable—would run out of chances entirely and serve a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life. 1 There were no exceptions or loopholes.
    Reynolds and his group collected thousands of signatures to qualify for a statewide referendum. There are countless referendum ideas in every California election season, and most never see the light of day. But Three Strikes struck a nerve. It passed with the support of an astonishing 72 percent of the state’s voters, and in the spring of 1994, Three Strikes was signed into law, almost word for word the way it was written up in Mike Reynolds’s backyard. The criminologist Franklin Zimring called it “the largest penal experiment in American history.” There were eighty thousand people