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

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