changed

On Sept. 11, 2001, there were no smartphones and no social media. What the country watched that morning — a jet airliner colliding with the south tower of the World Trade Center, the ash rolling through the streets, the paper still falling in the afternoon — was through a television set and the journalists who had to deliver the unfathomable details.

The jarring images shattered the peacefulness of a sunshine-filled late summer morning in New York.

“Everything seemed so perfect,” said MS NOW’s Chris Jansing, reflecting on the moments before anchoring her network’s continuous coverage. “It was another day of doing a job I loved, living in a city I loved.”

By nightfall, nearly 3,000 people were dead in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in a field outside Shanksville, Pa. The experience of covering the terrorist attacks and their grim aftermath transformed Jansing and other journalists who were there. Twenty-five years later, it’s never far from their minds.

“It’s with me in ways large and small,” said NJ Burkett, a correspondent who covered the tragedy for New York station WABC. “When I look at my phone and it says 9:11, it takes me back.”

The Times asked five of the on-air personalities who are still working today to look back on the day they were called to cover the tragedy and its lasting impact.

Bret Baier: “I just said yes to everything.”

Fox News anchor Bret Baier at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 25, 2026.

(Jared Soares/For The Times)

On every anniversary of Sept. 11, Fox News anchor Bret Baier uses the hashtag #NeverForget. He can recall every moment of that day.

Baier, 56, was driving to the Fox News bureau in Atlanta when he first heard on his car radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He was a 31-year-old correspondent for the network, covering stories throughout the southeast U.S. and Latin America. When he arrived at the office, a call came from New York headquarters telling him to book a flight to the city so he could file reports from the World Trade Center site for Fox TV affiliates around the United States.

After a second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center 17 minutes later, all flights in the U.S. were halted. Baier and his producer were told to get a car and start driving.

“I just remember going really fast when I was driving,” Baier said. “I remember thinking what is happening with the world, and how big this story is. How big this moment is.”

By the time the duo reached northern Georgia, their plans changed again. A jetliner struck the Pentagon while a San Francisco-bound United Airlines flight crashed in Shanksville, Pa. Fox News executives told Baier and his producer to reroute to Arlington, Va.

After the 10-hour drive, Baier started the first of 10 straight days of reporting on the recovery efforts at the site. While the World Trade Center provided the most dramatic and enduring pictures of the stunning attack, the loss of life at the Pentagon was staggering as well, as 125 people died along with the 64 passengers and crew members on American Airlines Flight 77.

Baier was eventually pulled into the larger military story that followed 9/11. Fox News, just 5 years old, did not have a full-time Pentagon correspondent. Baier was offered the job while traveling overseas with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was making the case for war against Afghanistan.

“I called a buddy on a satellite phone to get me an apartment in Washington,” he said. “Fox packed up my stuff in Atlanta.”

But the unplanned move changed Baier’s life. In six years on the Pentagon beat, he traveled to 74 countries. He was embedded with the military in war zones. “I just said yes to everything,” said Baier, who has anchored Fox News’ Washington newscast “Special Report” since 2009.

Baier recalled it was in the weeks after Sept. 11 that he first wore an American flag pin on his lapel. He never felt conflicted about it, even though such displays were prohibited at other network news divisions. “I thought I could report on America, ask tough questions and still be an American, pulling for us to win,” he said. “I wanted to be tough but fair, but also show that as a country we were standing together against this horrible attack.”

Byron Pitts covering the terrorist attacks in lower Manhattan for CBS News on Sept. 11, 2001.

(CBS)

Byron Pitts: “It’s the only story I think about every day.”

A newcomer to New York 25 years ago, Byron Pitts, then a CBS News correspondent, admitted it took him a few moments to understand the massive scope of what happened the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He arrived early at the network’s headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan to screen an interview he did with entertainer and civil rights icon Harry Belafonte. Shortly after he started, a producer knocked on his door and told him there was a plane crash at the World Trade Center.

Pitts, 65, acknowledged the producer but kept working. “I thought it was a novice pilot bumping into a building,” he recalled. “I thought it would be three hours out of my day and it won’t make television.”

The producer came back shortly and said, “You need to go down there.”

An irritated Pitts hailed a cab and headed down the West Side Highway. While in the car, he learned a second plane had hit the south tower. Traffic was stopped and he had to head downtown by foot.

As Pitts got closer to the site, he tried to use his past experiences covering fires and other disasters during his career to judge the severity of the situation.

But the horrible scenes that unfolded before him were incomparable. One was a lifeless body near the lobby of the north tower. He thought it was a homeless man until he saw a uniform. He later learned it was Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York Fire Department killed by fallen debris. Judge’s body was later carried away by a group of first responders. Pitts saw a woman and a man standing at a window of one of the towers holding hands, and then jumping.

“Gravity takes over and their hands split, and he moves a little faster than she does,” Pitts said. “And we see them on the ground. That was the moment I realized something significant was going on.”

Pitts crossed paths with Mika Brzezinski, then a CBS News correspondent, now the cohost of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.” As debris came down and smoke filled the air, they headed into an elementary school that Pitts believes was a command post for the fire and police departments. They took turns calling into CBS News on a hard-line phone, one delivering accounts of the unfolding catastrophe while the other looked outside to gather details amid the blinding smoke and dust.

Pitts said from that day forward, he never went to a story assignment without a handkerchief.

Pitts was awed not just by the enormity of the event, but also by how despite the rigid hierarchy of CBS News, he was “the new kid on the block” who had to present the story on Dan Rather’s evening newscast that night.

“My approach became almost childlike, so I would not become overwhelmed,” he said. “I tried to make it as simple as possible. I said, ‘Dan, I’ve never heard New York City this quiet.’ I was thinking — what simple thing can I say that you would understand if you’ve never been in New York.”

A few weeks later, Pitts headed off to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. military action. His evening news report on Sept. 11 won an Emmy Award and his star rose at CBS News, leading to “60 Minutes” and then ABC News in 2014, where he is currently a co-anchor of “Nightline.”

Pitts knows the good fortune he’s had in TV journalism is linked to the tragedy that started with a producer’s knock on his door 25 years ago. “I feel some measure of guilt but mostly gratitude,” he said. “It’s the only story I think about every day.”

Pitts said he uses his 9/11 experience to provide perspective. “When we’re discussing politics, a mass shooting, or the latest awful day in Iran, I know for a fact there is one guy in the room who has seen worse and who can say, ‘we’ll be OK,’ ” he said.

Chris Jansing: “You had to balance the news response with the human response.”

Chris Jansing paid her dues as a local reporter in upstate New York before she joined MSNBC (now called MS NOW) as a daytime anchor in 1998. She loved living in Manhattan, and took friends from out of town to the World Trade Center observation decks and Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower.

“It was so iconically New York,” she said. “And I was proud to live in the city.”

Jansing, 69, had little time to process her emotions when she was told to “get in the chair” before 9 a.m. that morning at MSNBC’s Secaucus, N.J., studios after the first plane hit.

“You had to balance the news response with the human response,” she recalled.

For several hours, Jansing co-anchored the network’s coverage alongside Gregg Jarrett. The look of 24-hour cable news evolved that day, as the tsunami of information led to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN all adding running tickers at the bottom of the screen.

Jansing went to the roof of the network’s building after Brian Williams took over the anchor chair. Trauma centers in the area had been alerted, and she was told to watch for ambulances. “There was still a hope and a prayer that there would be injured folks who would overwhelm the hospitals in New York and would need to be brought to New Jersey,” Jansing recalled. She saw none.

Jansing has never watched the coverage of that day, which is now on YouTube. She had real-life reminders every day in her Manhattan neighborhood when she walked by the Rescue Company 1 firehouse that lost half its battalion at the crash site. She adopted a dog left behind by a 9/11 victim, a Dachshund named Baron. She remains friends with every producer she worked with on the story. The experience also reinforced her purpose in a career approaching its 50th year.

“I will always think that those moments are what keep you going,” said Jansing, currently chief political reporter for MS NOW. “They were an affirmation that’s kept me in the job,”

NJ Burkett, a correspondent for WABC, on the 13th floor of the Walt Disney Co. offices in Manhattan on Aug. 31, 2026.

(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)

NJ Burkett: “I put myself in increasingly dangerous situations.”

Burkett, 64, recalls how pedestrians were gathered around WABC’s windowed street level studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when he arrived for work on 9/11. He presumed the crowd was there for a big name guest on “Live with Regis and Kelly.” They were actually watching monitors showing news reports of the first plane that hit the north tower.

As Burkett and his cameraman Marty Glembotzky headed downtown in a truck, he already knew it was a terror attack. He recalled covering the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center and regretted not getting footage of the firefighters’ rescue efforts. This time around he wanted to go inside the buildings and document their heroism.

A police officer stopped Burkett and Glembotzky before they could get in, likely saving their lives. A short time later, they would escape death again.

Burkett was doing a second take for a taped report that would set the scene for viewers when he heard the rumbling that “sounded like Niagara Falls.” It was the south tower of the World Trade Center coming down behind him. “A huge explosion now raining debris on us — we better get out of the way,” he said in what may be the most terrifying video clip from that morning.

Burkett and Glembotzky took cover in an adjacent building. “We open up the door and in a weird way it’s sort of providential, right?” he said. “The door is a metaphor. It’s like the door into the rest of your life. If we had to run for half a block, we’d be dead.”

Glembotzky was so shaken by the experience, he stepped away from his career as a cameraman and became a wine seller before eventually returning. But Burkett took on more dangerous assignments in the Middle East, heading to Israel to cover the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. He later headed to Iraq to cover the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Burkett won a George Foster Peabody Award for his work on 9/11. In retrospect, he believes he took on assignments in war zones to avoid dealing with the trauma of the day.

“I would put myself into increasingly dangerous situations,” he said. “Looking back, I was running from 9/11. That was my way of coping. Sometimes I wonder did I allow myself feel it enough. Or did I just run too far and too hard and it will all come down and crash on me one day?”

Occasionally he worries about 9/11-related illnesses. “If I start to cough — the slightest little cough — I’ll think ‘is this it?’” he said.

But as a New York TV fixture since 1989, Burkett still feels the appreciation from viewers for his efforts. “To this day, almost 25 years later, people will come up to me on the street and ask to hug me and say ‘NJ Burkett I’m glad you’re alive,’ ” he said.

Carson Daly at NBC’s “Today” show studio at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan on Sept. 3, 2026.

(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)

Carson Daly: “I remember how motionless the room was.”

As continuous news coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks saturated television for days, the makers of entertainment shows had to decide when it would be appropriate to go back to work. Carson Daly and the MTV executives mulled over the situation as their wildly popular program “Total Request Live” remained off the air for three days since the attacks.

“We had such a massive audience that the question was raised, ‘do we have a responsibility to simply show up?’ ” Daly, 53, recalled in a recent interview.

Daly, now a feature anchor on NBC’s “Today,” was not a journalist by trade. But he understood the trust that young viewers had in him and “TRL,” a live show that counted down the most popular music videos of the moment. The show had dealt with tragedy a few years before after the high school shooting in Columbine, Colo.

But 9/11 happened on the home turf of “TRL,” which aired from New York City’s Times Square. With the bridges and tunnels closed, getting a crew to the studio was a challenge.

“Everybody wore multiple hats,” said Daly, who also served as an executive producer.

By Sept. 14 of that week, the MTV studio on Broadway was filled with young “TRL” fans, but lacked the energy viewers were used to seeing on the screen. “They were frozen,” Daly recalled. “That was in such stark contrast to what the show was every day. I remember how motionless the room was and feeling like, ‘What am I doing on television?’ ”

Carson Daly shows a tattoo he got after the 9/11 attacks in New York.

(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)

Daly leaned on the MTV News team to update the audience on the 9/11 story developments. Music stars including Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Kid Rock called into the program to share their thoughts with Daly. Instead of music videos, the screen showed email messages from viewers expressing their feelings about the tragedy.

MTV News personality Sway delivered a music news report that noted how two new CD releases — “Party Music” by the American hip-hop group The Coup and Dream Theater’s “Live Scenes from New York” — were delayed because both used cover artwork that depicted the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Daly has a permanent remembrance of the week. When he arrived at the MTV offices the day before “TRL” returned, the building was evacuated after it received a bomb threat.

“I remember walking around Hell’s Kitchen,” he said. “I ended up getting a tattoo. A red, white and blue NYC on my right wrist.”

Steve Cooley is florid-faced and unequivocal as he responds to a question during a public forum at USC last June. Asked about Proposition 66, the initiative to amend California’s three-strikes law on the November ballot, the Los Angeles County district attorney essentially has two things to say: He hates it, and he will work for its defeat.

Then he lays out his case opposing the ponderously titled “Limitations on Three Strikes Law. Sex Crimes. Punishment. Initiative Statute”: Only one sex crime against a child will be affected. It eliminates several crimes that can trigger a third-strike sentence. And because it’s retroactive, thousands of prisoners will have to be resentenced within 180 days of its becoming law. “This initiative is a bad, bad idea,” Cooley says.

Intently scribbling notes just a few feet away is 53-year-old Sam Clauder. At 6-foot-3 and 270 big-bellied pounds, Clauder is dressed in a suit and tie instead of his more typical attire of a blue John Kerry-for-President gimme cap, Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. Rarely looking up as he writes, Clauder gives no clue that he’s at the forum to scout the opposition or that he wrote the initial draft of the proposition that Cooley is trashing.

If you’d known Clauder years ago, you’d find that hard to believe. In November 1994, Clauder was among the 72% of Californians who voted in favor of the three-strikes law, sending a law-and-order message that defined the decade. The vote reaffirmed the same law that had been passed by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Pete Wilson eight months earlier, but this version had more teeth. Any attempts to amend the three-strikes law, now that it had been approved as an initiative, would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature instead of a simple majority.

In 1994, Clauder had done more than vote for three strikes. He had worked as a “ballot access consultant,” coordinating the gathering of petition signatures for statewide initiatives. But three strikes was different. He believed that the law’s passage was essential for public safety, believed it so strongly that in one 10-day period he oversaw the gathering of 12,000 signatures.

During the next two years, however, Clauder began hearing horror stories of people who were being sentenced for 25 years to life in prison for petty crimes. Not only had he personally favored the law, as a consultant he says he had “made money off the backs of these people.” He decided to set things right. In this he is not alone.

From the beginning, the three-strikes law has been shaped by personal stories, some tragic, others epiphanies. Fresno photographer Mike Reynolds helped start the movement after the murder of his 18-year-old daughter. Three strikes was further fueled by public reaction to one of the most publicized crimes in recent California history–the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas by Richard Allen Davis, a brutal, twice-convicted kidnapper.

This year’s attempt to reform the three-strikes law on its 10th anniversary also is rife with pain and loss and, most of all, a change of heart. Two self-described ragtag volunteer activists worked for years in anonymity to reform it. Polly Klaas’ grandfather has become its powerful advocate. A wealthy Sacramento insurance broker with a son in prison stepped in to personally bankroll it.

All four supported the original three-strikes law. All four have changed their minds.

For Sam Clauder and many others, the official ballot argument in favor of the 1994 law sounded right on the money. “Three strikes keeps career criminals who rape women, molest children and commit murder behind bars where they belong,” it read.

What many voters didn’t recognize, however, was that they also were voting to place a man such as Willie Turner in prison for 25 years to life. His third crime? Attempting to buy a macadamia nut disguised as a $5 rock of cocaine from an undercover cop. They didn’t realize that Rene Landa would receive a third strike for stealing a spare tire, or Johnny Quirino for shoplifting some razor blades, or Scott Benscotter for stealing a pair of sneakers, or Robert Di Blasi for shoplifting $2.69 worth of AA batteries, or Eric Simmons for being in possession of three stolen ceiling fans, or Joey Arthur Fernandez for aiding and abetting the theft of baby formula and Tylenol.

Most of these men have long criminal histories. The petty nature of their third strike sometimes masks the serious nature of their previous crimes. But many also have no record of violence. They are simply society’s natural-born losers–kinetic speed freaks and crackheads, washed-out winos and small-time thieves–Fellini’s freaks, Charles Bukowski’s barflies, junkies and addicts who got their first two strikes by committing burglaries to support their habits, often decades earlier.

Newsweek has called California’s law “the toughest” in the nation. U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens reacted to such sentences by declaring California “the only state in [the union] in which a misdemeanor could receive such a severe sentence.” California’s three-strikes law, in fact, is the only one of 26 three-strikes states that doesn’t require a violent crime conviction to trigger a third strike. The state’s 7,400 third-strikers are more than half the total number of those imprisoned for third strikes in the U.S. Of those Californians, 57% are now serving sentences based on a nonviolent third crime–among them 357 for petty theft and 678 for drug possession. About 35,000 other prisoners have had their sentences doubled for second strikes under another provision of the law.

Getting Proposition 66 on the ballot has been a great victory for Clauder and other reformers–the only one that California’s three-strikes opponents have had in a long, frustrating decade of failed attempts. There’s no guarantee that the initiative will pass: Virtually the entire criminal justice system in California is opposing Proposition 66, and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer have both signed the official ballot argument against it.

Nevertheless, there are signs that this year could be different. In a Field Poll conducted last month, 69% of likely voters supported Proposition 66, including 60% of Republicans and 59% of conservatives, and 78% said that Schwarzenegger and Lockyer’s opposition would not affect their vote.

Opponents such as L. Douglas Pipes, a Contra Costa County senior deputy district attorney who analyzed the initiative, have warned that it could result in as many as 26,000 second- and third-strikers being resentenced soon after its passage. That situation, he says, could release thousands of prisoners and throw California’s court and corrections systems and county jails into chaos.

A legal opinion commissioned by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, however, maintains that only third-strikers would be affected. Using Department of Corrections figures, that comes out to about 4,200 inmates who would be eligible for revised sentences.

In 1994, Sam Clauder was a 43-year-old ex-private eye and aspiring producer/writer/director/actor. Smart and hyper-garrulous, he radiated a boyish naivete and a profound sense of right and wrong.

Born in Houston, Clauder was raised in an Assemblies of God Pentecostal sect, “far to the right of Jerry Falwell,” he says. He once stole a piece of gum from a local store and, racked with guilt, immediately returned, showed the clerk the chewed mass inside his mouth and told him he needed to pay for it. His father, a rigid man, was a Houston police officer before moving his family to Orange County and becoming active in the John Birch Society.

At 16, Clauder got “fed up with the hypocrisy of the church” and began experimenting with Hinduism and other religious faiths. In 1970, while a student at a local community college, he began hanging out with Vietnam veterans. Listening to stories of the horrors they had experienced and also committed in war led to his reexamining and then rejecting the conservative political values he’d always known. By 1971 he had become a political activist, volunteering to work on ballot initiatives to save the California coastline and to legalize marijuana. For the next 30 years, as Clauder tells it, he dabbled in the movies, gathered petition signatures and worked in Texas as a licensed private bail bondsman and bounty hunter.

Late in 1994, as Clauder was advising author and activist Jack Herer on an initiative to decriminalize marijuana, Herer began hammering away at him for contributing to the passage of the three-strikes law. Shortly after, Clauder realized that “Jack was right.” No one incident brought about his epiphany, just a cumulative awareness of people’s victimless crimes that he didn’t think should be against the law in the first place. “I was flabbergasted,” he says, “and so angry that I made a promise that I was going to do everything in my power to make up for that error.”

Three years later, Clauder received a visit from Jim Benson, who had heard that Clauder was an experienced hand in the initiative process. Benson asked him how to get a three-strikes reform proposition on the ballot.

Trim and gray-haired, Benson is a slow-talking, soft-spoken native of Ohio who also had supported and voted for the law. A self-described political moderate, he previously had worked for Reform Party presidential candidates John Anderson and Ross Perot. He also served as chair of the Reform Party in Orange County, and was a candidate for a Santa Ana state Assembly seat and a member of the Orange County Democratic Central Committee.

But in the spring of 1998 Benson spoke with some Green Party activists at a Cinco de Mayo festival in Santa Ana who told him about the eyebrow-raising sentences being handed down. “I thought that they surely had to be nuts,” Benson says. Later he told a friend about the encounter. “They’re right,” his friend replied. “I know someone who just received 25-to-life for some marijuana offense.”

“That was not what I had voted for,” Benson says, “and I knew I had to do something about it. I believe strongly in keeping serious criminals who’ve committed repeat serious crimes in prison forever. But I also know what it’s like to be addicted to alcohol and drugs. And I know that with treatment and determination, it’s possible to recover.”

As the vice chairman of Proposition 66’s sponsoring organization, the Orange County-based Citizens Against Violent Crime, Benson is responsible for running the day-to-day campaign. Like Clauder, he’s an unlikely crusader. At 41, he’s a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 22 years. He started drinking gin at 14 and was downing two fifths a day when he was forced, he says, “to quit or die.” He had attended a small Ohio college for a year, and afterward worked as a limo and taxi driver, auto mechanic, cash register clerk and dealer of baseball cards and rare coins.

At their first meeting, Benson and Clauder talked an entire morning about what it would take to get an initiative on the ballot–about half a million dollars and at least several million more to run a statewide campaign against what surely would be powerful opposition from conservative politicians, their liberal counterparts worried about being labeled “soft on crime,” and the powerful special interests within what amounts to a statewide criminal justice industry.

In the fall of 1999, Clauder read a three-strikes commentary in the Los Angeles Times written by Polly Klaas’ grandfather, Joe Klaas. Clauder got in touch with Klaas, a now-retired 84-year-old resident of Pebble Beach, and he agreed to become the reform effort’s public face and chief spokesman.

Klaas has traveled thousands of miles through the state in his ’85 Buick Regal, trying to get the three-strikes law amended. Now he says he’s “too old to drive eight hours a day.” Instead he spends at least 20 hours a week at his computer or on the phone, speaking almost daily with leaders of the reform effort.

A former stringer for the Associated Press who also worked as a talk-radio host and station manager, Klaas had campaigned for the passage of three strikes alongside his son and Polly’s father, Marc Klaas. But then he began looking into the initiative’s fine print with a cooler eye.

In late February 1994, Joe Klaas talked to a reporter in Petaluma who told him about some of the more draconian provisions of the law. Then he decided to read the proposal and check it against a California law book. As he did, he realized that not only did it not take a violent crime to trigger a third strike, but that any one of California’s 500-plus felonies could trigger the sentence.

Klaas then spoke with someone in the legislative analyst’s office who explained that the bill also included minor misdemeanors that could be “enhanced” to felonies and fall under the law. Klaas was horrified. “This isn’t what everybody thinks it is,” he thought. “Nobody’s ever mentioning these nonviolent crimes.” Klaas’ realization came too late to make much difference, but soon after, Joe and Marc Klaas opposed the version of the law on the ballot and Joe became its fiercest critic both during the campaign and after it was approved.

It might seem incongruous that a man who had lost his granddaughter to a demented murderer would become an implacable foe of three strikes. But only if you’d never met Joe Klaas, an idealist from a different time. At the outbreak of World War II in Europe, he quit the University of Washington, joined England’s Royal Air Force and fought as a Spitfire pilot. After joining the U.S. forces, he was shot down over North Africa and spent the rest of the war as a POW, seeing, he says, “Allied prisoners gunned down not 50 feet” from him.

But there was more than that. For many years he had volunteered at San Quentin, Soledad and Vacaville prisons to coordinate 12-step recovery programs for inmates. (He was forced to stop because of the warped convict logic that held Polly responsible for the passage of three strikes. If he continued volunteering, prison officials told him, he’d be a marked man.)

Just how strongly Klaas opposed three strikes was visible one morning in 2000 as he spoke to the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee. “I want to state up front that the murder, rape and kidnapping of my granddaughter, Polly Klaas, was exploited by this ‘three-strikes’ bill–a bill which didn’t stand a chance in hell of passing before Polly’s killing,” Klaas said.

“As a former prisoner of the Nazis,” he continued, “I can say that taking 25 years of somebody’s life for committing a nonviolent crime is violence almost on the level with murder. [Sentencing someone] to 25-to-life because he made a false application for a real estate loan, or for taking aspirin out of a bottle and putting the bottle back on the shelf in a drugstore–now that is violence.”

Despite Klaas’ passion, his son Marc has become a staunch opponent of Proposition 66, believing, as he recently told the Sacramento Bee, that “certain people are hard-wired for crime” and need to be locked up for decades, even if their third strike is a petty crime, so that they don’t “revictimize.” Their rift is so painful that Joe Klaas refuses to talk about it, other than to say, “We can’t be in the same town together because he’s so mad at me for not switching with him against [Proposition 66].”

Geri Silva, a founding member and former state chair of Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, has called Klaas’ emergence in the reform struggle significant: “Joe Klaas wasn’t just some guy off the street. He came from the other side. He could have been out there talking about how if we’d had this three-strikes law earlier, his granddaughter would still be alive. Instead he was aligning himself with us. And that was major.”

In 2003, Benson and Joe Klaas began a fundraising drive, sending out letters and e-mails signed by Klaas and actor/activist Ed Asner. Jerry Keenan, a wealthy owner of a Sacramento auto insurance firm who previously had made a token contribution, got a letter and decided to essentially bankroll the initiative.

“I went numb,” Benson says. “It was so entirely unexpected. I thought, maybe we can actually do this thing.” Keenan’s check was for $300,000, a down payment on the $1.6 million he has contributed so far. Benson, who had been aiming to get the initiative on the ballot in 2006, turned his sights on 2004.

Keenan and his wife, Cynthia, had voted for the three-strikes law. But “the more we learned about how it was being misused,” Keenan says, “the more we became determined to modify the law.” They learned about it in a very personal way.

One night in 1999, the Keenans’ then-21-year-old son, Richard, smoked some grass, drank beer with his friends and climbed into his gold Lexus with four of them. His driver’s license had been suspended after he’d been caught with a small amount of marijuana in his car, but Richard, as his lawyers tell it, was unaware that the suspension had gone into effect. He cranked up the Lexus to about 20 miles above the 55 mph speed limit on an undulating back road, and the Lexus flipped over. Two of his passengers–both 19 years old–died.

Richard Keenan pleaded guilty to two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter, plus one count of causing great bodily injury, and received an eight-year prison sentence in 2000. “Great bodily injury” is a “strikable” offense, and should Keenan commit a second felony, he could receive a second strike and his sentence would be doubled.

“When Richard was linked to three strikes,” Jerry Keenan says, “it opened my eyes. Something was horribly wrong if a three-strikes law could affect someone like Richard.” A precise, soft-spoken man, Keenan has reluctantly put himself in the public limelight.

Perhaps not coincidentally, about the time that Keenan helped fund the initiative, a new provision was written into the proposed proposition. If great bodily injury happened accidentally, it read, without the intent to commit harm, the conviction would not count as a strike.

The addition of the provision has led to accusations that Jerry Keenan is trying to purchase a law, and the family of one of his son’s victims has publicly objected.

Buying legislation, however, is what California initiatives have been about for decades. At the turn of the 20th century, the state’s good-government Progressives sought to take power away from the robber barons and railroad titans and place it in the hands of the people. But that experiment in democracy has morphed into a multimillion-dollar industry where campaign consulting firms can make as much as $7 million spearheading a single initiative.

In 1994, when Mike Reynolds’ three-strikes campaign was desperate for cash, the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. stepped in to contribute $101,000. The National Rifle Assn. contributed at least $90,000 and U.S. senatorial candidate Michael Huffington donated $350,000. That was $541,000 out of the campaign’s $1.6 million in total spending–key portions of it coming at a time when Reynolds’ campaign was barely afloat. At the time, voters were concerned about gun control. Three strikes enabled the NRA to change the public conversation from gun control to its theme of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and Huffington to prove his law-and-order bona fides in a law-and-order year. (He lost.)

California’s three-strikes law also was very good for the prison guards’ union. Increasing numbers of prisoners held for vastly longer periods of time require more guards, new prisons and lucrative overtime pay. The guards’ union “and others came in and bought the three-strikes law by donating money that enabled it to pass,” Keenan says. “I’m not trying to buy a new law, just modify the current one.”

Steve Cooley says he realizes the law has been applied unfairly, and he blames his predecessor and other prosecutors who used it to pump up their “get-tough” credentials. “Disproportional, bizarre, unusual and draconian” are some of the adjectives Cooley uses to describe the three-strikes policy of former L.A. Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti.

“His policy was to prosecute petty crimes as three strikes,” Cooley says at the USC forum. “Mine has been exactly the opposite: You cannot pursue ‘got ya’ prosecutions and maintain a credible criminal justice system.”

Whether the state is maintaining a credible justice system, however, is a larger question than three-strikes reform.

The chairman of an investigative panel appointed by the governor recently described the state’s corrections department management as “deficient and dysfunctional.” The panel’s report cited “too much political interference, too much union control and too little management courage, accountability and transparency.” In April, the Department of Corrections declared a state of emergency for five prisons due to overcrowding–despite a $5.8 billion annual corrections budget and the building of 21 new prisons during the last two decades at a cost of more than $4 billion. A judge is now threatening to place the adult prison system under federal receivership.

Nevertheless, Gov. Schwarzenegger is taking a leading role in opposing the initiative. Joe Klaas finds this “amazing” given that it is “something [that] could save so much money by no longer putting petty criminals behind bars for 25 years to life.”

According to a report by the state legislative analyst’s office, Proposition 66’s passage would, in fact, result in state “prison operations savings of potentially several tens of millions of dollars in the first couple of years, growing to as much as several hundred millions in ongoing savings when the full impact of the measure is realized in about a decade.” In addition, the report states, “The lower prison population resulting from this measure would potentially result in capital outlay savings . . . associated with prison construction and renovations.” State and local costs for the courts and county jails would increase, however.

Cooley’s opposition is equally surprising. But he’s a veteran of 32 years as a prosecutor and is a member in good standing of the state’s criminal justice industry, with its $17.5 billion annual budget and the political juice to literally dictate crime and punishment policy.

He doesn’t see the proposition as a remedy for the three-strikes excesses of which he accuses Garcetti, or other excesses across the state. He would instead get the California District Attorneys Assn., which is fiercely battling the initiative, to support a three-strikes reform bill in the state Legislature. But getting a two-thirds vote to soften the controversial hard-line law is unlikely. Why would district attorneys want to give up a sledgehammer used to intimidate defendants into accepting harsh plea bargains? Cooley is his own man, but he’s no maverick.

After the forum, Clauder’s appraisal of Cooley’s position is that he’s been “doing a good job implementing a bad law.” And the three-strikes policy of Cooley’s office has, in fact, not been much different in its bare-bones essentials than the reform initiative he is now vehemently opposing.

Before his election in 2000, Cooley declared, “If the potential third strike is a ‘violent or serious’ felony, the case should be . . . pursued as a third strike. If it is not a ‘violent or serious’ felony, the case . . . should not be pursued as a third strike.” Cooley proved true to his word. Mirroring a statewide trend, third-strike convictions in L.A. County dropped from 526 in the peak year of 1997 to 113 in 2003 under Cooley.

So why his blanket opposition? One reason, Clauder suggests, is that “Cooley’s present policy is Cooley’s policy, he has control over it, it’s his decision to use it or not. He won’t have that power if Proposition 66 passes.” Cooley says he simply thinks the initiative is bad, citing one provision that would eliminate a district attorney’s ability to get multiple strike convictions in the same proceeding.

In any case, given the numerous failed legislative attempts to reform mandatory minimum sentences such as three strikes in California or the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, Clauder probably has it right: “You can’t rely on politicians to correct the law. You have to correct it by initiative. Only then will policy follow.”

“The phone is ringing off the wall,” Clauder says, and he is “breathing fire,” fielding calls from people who, like him, are unhappy that the final version of Proposition 66 doesn’t apply retroactively to second-strikers. He’s still actively supporting the proposition, but he has now formed his own organization, “Yes on 66.” Its major mission will be to influence the debate so that when Proposition 66 is adjudicated–should it pass–a judge might rule that including second-strikers was the voters’ intent.

Jim Benson, meanwhile, is working with Joe Klaas on the campaign. So far, the proposition’s supporters include the California Federation of Labor and the California State Employees Assn. Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News and San Diego Union-Tribune have published editorials in favor of it.

In August, Klaas had what he thought was a heart attack during a meeting in Monterey. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, and he is now attributing it to work “overload.” “I’m 84, and everybody I knew who should be 84 is dead,” he says.

Jerry Keenan says he is only “among the people who have financed” a new organization called “Fix Three Strikes, Yes on 66,” designed to pull together several organizations supporting the proposition. “Fix Three Strikes” also is discussing raising several million dollars–in addition to the $1.6 million that Keenan already has donated–to buy television ads when the campaign reaches its apex in the fall. They’ve hired the top-gun political consulting and advertising firm Zimmerman and Markman–which produced a number of anti-Bush television commercials for MoveOn.org–to create the ads.

Jerry and Cynthia Keenan visit their son every weekend at the minimum-security Folsom prison ranch, a vast improvement from the three years of hard time he served. “The other side fought against Richard serving his time at the ranch, but he’s doing much better now,” Keenan says.

As for the 57% of prisoners whose third strike was for a nonviolent crime, they wait for the voters of California to decide whether or not they’ll be spending the rest of their lives in prison.

Researcher Jessica Gelt contributed to this story.

A HIDDEN Greek island is set to boom next year thanks to a major blockbuster movie.

Ithaca in Greece is known as being the home of Odysseus from Homer’s Odyssey.

And thanks to the recent Hollywood movie release, the island is expecting more tourists.

Quieter than its famous neighbours, you’ll find olive groves across the island as well as secluded coves that are ideal for snorkelling.

In the capital, Vathy, you can head to one of the world’s largest natural harbours.

The town is also home to an Archaeological Museum with artefacts dating back to the Roman times.

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And if you hadn’t had enough of museums, you could then head to the Nautical and Folklore Museum, which dates back to 1923 and showcases the lifestyle of Old Ithaca.

Like many places in Greece, there are also a number of archaeological sites to explore such as the School of Homer.

Or you could visit Aestos – an ancient acropolis sat on a hilltop.

According to Sunvil, the island has “barely changed for centuries” making it the perfect Greek holiday without the crowds and influences of modernity.

There are several beaches across the island to explore including Gidaki Beach, which is a white pebble beach with clear waters.

You can get to the beach by hiking or boat.

Filiatro Beach is probably the most accessible; it is a short drive from Vathy.

At the beach you can rent a sunbed and there is a small beach bar as well.

A recent visitor said: “Love this beach, parking simple, turquoise waters, calm, great for snorkeling, toilets available, paddle boards to hire kept our kids happy, loads of shade under the olive trees.”

From Ithaca you can also head to a number of other islands, including Kefalonia and seasonally to Lefkada, Corfu and Zante.

There are lots of places to stay on Ithaca, though most of the options are villas – including ones with breathtaking views and pools.

The best way to get to Ithaca is by flying to Kefalonia Airport, which costs from £28 per flight.

The drive is around 30 minutes to the port of Sami where you can catch a ferry over to Ithaca, which takes around another 30 minutes.

L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman did something last week few prosecutors ever do — changed his mind in public, swapping out felony charges for misdemeanors in the case of an LAPD officer accused of secretly taping homophobic, racist and misogynistic remarks made by colleagues.

Since then, Hochman has been slammed for playing politics, embarrassing his office and even backing down for no reason other than the pressure was too intense.

Not a stellar look for a politician relatively new to elected office.

After speaking with Hochman about the reversal, I have a more optimistic take on it — drawn from a Talmudic quote that Hochman keeps on his desk, and which his father — a tax lawyer who represented at least one mobster — kept on his desk before him.

It’s Deuteronomy 16:20, “Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof” — Justice, justice you shall pursue.

It’s that double justice that holds weight in this situation, because, as Hochman explains it, his god rarely repeats himself without reason. Hochman said he reads that echo as referring to two parts of delivering justice — the process and the result.

“We try to get the right result. We try to get it in the right way,” Hochman told me.

When things go wrong, like they did in this case, he’ll reevaluate, he said, even if it leaves him with egg on his face.

“If that means that I have to publicly come out at a press conference and say that our initial decision-making, and what went into it, turns out not to have been perfect, and it is not set in stone, and we think there’s a better way of doing something, I’m going to stand up in a press conference and say exactly that,” he said.

A prosecutor who is willing to change his or her mind is critical to delivering real justice, because people get things wrong. Hochman holds incredible power over the thousands of lives entangled in the matters his office handles. Leaving that power of process in the hands of someone who can’t admit they made a mistake (as is the case with more D.A.’s than not) puts justice on a greased slide into a cesspool of hubris.

The distinction between the two forms of justice may seem like splitting hairs, but to anyone who has ever been involved with our justice system — as a victim or defendant, innocent or guilty — being dragged into a prosecution can often feel like an avalanche of misfortune.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think every person charged with a crime is a victim. There are plenty of predators out there, committing violations big and small, that require accountability.

But the process of administering justice is far more subjective and messy than we often admit. Sometimes, even when the prosecutor involved almost certainly knows something other than justice is in the works, there is a momentum of ego and bureaucracy that is hard to reverse.

And it doesn’t take a guilty verdict to derail a life. Simply having charges filed can mean a job loss, losing custody of kids, incarceration for months or years waiting for a trial, financial hardship and stigma.

We like to think of an innocent verdict as a great vindication, but by the time one arrives, if it does, a lifetime of damage may already have been done — that is the unseen power of process.

Just ask Daniel Flores, the LAPD officer whose case we’re talking about. Though he likely will eventually see all criminal charges dismissed, Flores told my colleagues Libor Jany and Richard Winton that this incident has “ruined” his life.

Hochman for weeks has faced intense public anger over his initial decision to charge Flores with 16 felonies. Folks from the lofty heights of the mayor to this lowly columnist objected, pointing out that punishing whistleblowers, even ones who may have technically broken the law as Hochman said Flores likely did (though Flores’ lawyer disputes that), would chill other officers from coming forward.

Hochman at first defended the charges, pointing out that as a sworn officer, Flores had an even higher duty to adhere to the letter and spirit of the law.

But, he said, he was unprepared for how strongly the public would react to the whistleblower part of the case. Though he contends he never meant to send a message silencing those who would expose wrongdoing, he concedes that did happen.

“People interpreted it that we’re trying to discourage all whistleblowers by the way we went about this prosecution,” Hochman said.

He also acknowledges that he is still learning what it means to be in this elected office. Though he has been both a federal prosecutor and a defense attorney, this is by far the most publicly accountable and visible role he has held, and he’s still figuring out that part of the job. It’s easy to be the candidate lobbing criticisms, or even the defense lawyer arguing the facts. It is much harder to be the person answerable to the nearly 10 million people of Los Angeles County when it comes to ensuring they feel both protected and respected by the law.

In his first year in office, more than one civil liberties advocate has taken issue with his approach.

“It is a continuous learning experience. In fact, anyone who takes this job and doesn’t view this as a daily learning experience cannot possibly do the job well,” he said. “If you don’t adapt to what’s out there, you don’t listen to what’s going on … you will fail, and by failure, I mean that you won’t achieve a society where people trust that the district attorney’s office is doing its job and doing it as best as it possibly could,” he said.

He blames the media in part for distracting from his accountability message in favor of the whistleblower-chilling angle in the Flores case — likely including headlines such as the one I wrote, “Protecting the blue wall of silence is not justice in LAPD whistleblower case.”

I’m willing to stand by the process that got me to that opinion, and also to give Hochman credit for being willing to change direction on his process when it was leading our city down the wrong path.

There are plenty of places where I hope Hochman will apply that rigor in the future — issues such as the death penalty, which he has brought back to Los Angeles, or in other difficult cases such as the killing of Keith Porter Jr. by an off-duty ICE agent. Porter’s family recently asked Hochman to convene a grand jury to hear the facts.

But that Hochman thinks about process, and the power that it holds, speaks well for justice in Los Angeles — even, maybe especially, when things go awry.