Struck out Looking: Continued Confusion in Eighth Amendment Proportionality Review After Ewing V. California‪.‬

This past Term, California's "three strikes" law withstood two challenges in the Supreme Court. In Ewing v. California, the Court held that a sentence of 25-years-to-life imposed on a recidivist offender convicted of stealing three golf clubs worth approximately $1,200 did not violate the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishments clause. (1) It made a similar holding in Lockyer v. Andrade, although on different grounds. (2) This note will examine the Court's treatment of California's three strikes law in Ewing, and will argue that the Court missed an opportunity to make a necessary clarification of its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. Indeed, the Supreme Court made an already lamentable situation worse by applying proportionality review to non-capital sentences given to repeat offenders while neglecting to provide lower courts with any coherent guidelines to employ in conducting that review. In other words, the Court was thrown a perfect pitch on the three strikes question, but it struck out looking. I. LEGISLATIVE HISTORY