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

back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated “Oh, my Lord, my God” seventy times over. 8
    “I was taught that there was an alternative way to deal with injustice,” Derksen said. “I was taught it in school. We were taught the history of persecution. We had this picture of martyrdom that went right back to the sixteenth century. The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on.” To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. The Mennonites believe in the inverted-U curve.
    Mike Reynolds had none of that understanding of limits. He believed, as a matter of principle, that the state and the law could deliver justice for his daughter’s death. At one point, Reynolds spoke of the infamous Jerry DeWayne Williams case, which involved a young man arrested for grabbing a slice of pizza from four children on the Redondo Beach pier just south of Los Angeles. Because Williams had five previous convictions, for everything from robbery to drug possession to violating parole, the pizza-slice theft counted as his third strike. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life. 9 Williams had a longer sentence than his cellmate, who was a murderer.
    In retrospect, the Williams case was the beginning of the end for Mike Reynolds’s crusade. It highlighted everything that was wrong with Three Strikes. The law could not distinguish between pizza thieves and murderers. But Mike Reynolds never understood why the Williams case provoked so much public outrage. To him, Williams had violated a fundamental principle: he had repeatedly broken society’s rules and thereby forfeited his right to freedom. It was as simple as that. “Look,” Reynolds told me, “those that are actually going down on third strikes, they got there the old-fashioned way—they earned it.” What mattered to him was that the law made an example of repeat offenders. “Every time the media has done a story on some idiot that steals a slice of pizza and it was his third strike,” he went on, “that does more to stop crime than anything else in the state.”
    The British acted from the same principle in the early days of the Troubles. People cannot be allowed to make bombs and harbor automatic weapons and shoot one another in broad daylight. No civil society can survive under those circumstances. General Freeland had every right to get tough with thugs and gunmen.
    What Freeland did not understand, however, was the same thing that Reynolds did not understand: there comes a point where the best-intentioned application of power and authority begins to backfire. Searching the first house in the Lower Falls made sense. Ransacking the entire neighborhood only made things worse. By the mid-1970s, every Catholic household in Northern Ireland had been searched, on average, twice. In some neighborhoods, that number reached ten times or more. Between 1972 and 1977, one in four Catholic men in Northern Ireland between the ages of sixteen and forty-four were arrested at least once. Even if every one of those people had done something illegal, that level of severity cannot succeed. 10
    This final lesson about the limits of power is not easy to learn. It requires that those in positions of authority accept that what they thought of as their greatest advantage—the fact that they could search as many homes as they wanted and arrest as many people as they wanted and imprison people for as long as they wanted—has real constraints. Caroline Sacks faced a version of this when she realized that what she thought was an advantage actually put her at a disadvantage. But it is one thing to acknowledge the limitations of your own advantages if you are faced with the choice between a very good school and a very, very good school. It is quite another when you have held your daughter’s hand as she lay dying in a hospital bed. “Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn’t fix,” Reynolds said. What he promised his daughter was that he would stand up and say, Enough. He cannot be faulted for that. But the tragedy of Mike Reynolds was that in fulfilling that promise, he left California worse off than it had been before.
    Over the years, many people have come to Fresno to speak to