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

Wilma Derksen “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.” ...

1. One weekend in June of 1992, Mike Reynolds’s daughter came home from college to go to a wedding. She was eighteen, with long ...

Daily Planet restaurant, in Fresno’s Tower District. They had coffee and then wandered back to her Isuzu. It was 10:41 p.m. Reyn ...

addicts. Earlier in the evening, they had attempted a carjacking on Shaw Avenue, Fresno’s main thoroughfare. “I wasn’t really th ...

pulled out a .357 magnum handgun and placed it against her right ear. She resisted. He fired. Davis and Walker jumped back on th ...

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 no ...

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 f ...

2. When Reynolds came home from the hospital, he got a call from Ray Appleton, the host of a popular Fresno talk-radio show. “Th ...

after his daughter’s death.” Reynolds describes the two hours he spent on the Appleton show as the most difficult of his life. H ...

wooden table next to his outdoor barbecue. “We had three judges, people from the police department, lawyers, the sheriff, people ...

in with the law when he was thirteen years old for trafficking heroin. He had recently been given a temporary release so he coul ...

mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life.^1 There were no exceptions or loopholes. Reynolds and his group collected thous ...

experiment in American history.” There were eighty thousand people behind bars in California’s prisons in 1989. Within ten years ...

murders a day in the state of California. Today it’s about six,” Reynolds said. “So every day that goes by, I like to think that ...

rescue ’em from drowning or some other crazy thing. But how many people get a chance to save six people’s lives each and every d ...

of safety belts or air bags or tamper- proof medicine containers. I could sit here and go right through it. Simple devices that ...

or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect. Mike Reynolds came to wield extraordinary influence in his home state. ...

3. Let us go back to the theory of the inverted-U curve that we discussed in the chapter on class size. Inverted-U curves are al ...

argument that would end up pulling Mike Reynolds and his claims for Three Strikes into the center of two decades of controversy. ...

was just sixteen years, and you’d do eight,” Mike Reynolds explained. He was describing California before his Three Strikes revo ...