Delbert Meeks, 52, had lived on the streets for the past year. He has AIDS. His last felony, for a robbery, was in 1991. In 2000, he failed to register as a sex offender. This week, the California Supreme Court upheld his 27 year to life sentence on the failure to register charge, because it was his third strike.

Dissenting Justice Richard Sims was outraged. "What has become of our society?'' he asked in his dissent. "Why has 'compassion' become a dirty word in the law? I think that some years from now, law professors and law students will read this case and will ask, 'What on earth were they thinking?' "

Meeks' lawyer, Robert Wayne Gehring, said Friday he planned to appeal. "This offense did not involve any violence, damage or theft of property'' and would not have been charged as a third strike in some counties, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, he said.

California's three-strikes law is the toughest in the nation:

More than half the 7,200 inmates now serving 25 to life under the law were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including burglary, drug offenses and shoplifting, as their third strike. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that a 50-to-life sentence for a Southern California man convicted of two thefts of videotapes, after a long series of nonviolent offenses, did not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

California voters likely will have a chance to change the law this November. The proposed Amendment would require that the triggering offense for a three-strikes sentence to be a serious or violent felony.

As TChris wrote here:

One quarter of California prisoners are serving life terms under the three-strikes law, at a cost so far of about $8.1 billion. More than half that amount was spent to warehouse offenders whose third strike was not a violent crime. So the law is expensive, it wastes prison resources on people who don't deserve life sentences, and it seems to be implemented in a racially discriminatory manner. California, is that what you intended?

For more on three-strikes abuses, visit FACTS.