SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif — In 2002, a San Bernardino criminal judge sentenced a Black man to 35 years to life for reaching into an open car window and snatching a purse from the front seat.
The man, whose name will remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, was sentenced under California’s Three Strikes Law. His previous crimes were an assault on a police officer in 1992, when he was 19 years old, and stealing a pizza and a two-liter from a delivery driver in 1997.
According to data from Stanford University’s Three Strikes Project, the sentence is 40 percent longer than it would be for a white person…