Undoing injustice

That list is at the heart of Stanford Law School’s Three Strikes Project, a program founded to challenge California’s unjust sentencing laws and free people serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes. The program is named for the state’s 1994 Three Strikes law, which imposed life sentences after two prior “serious convictions”—a definition so broad it included stealing a bicycle or shoplifting VHS tapes.

Led by Romano, JD ’03, who teaches at Stanford Law School, the project combines litigation, student advocacy, and policy reform. Students work directly on cases—interviewing clients, gathering evidence, drafting motions—and, under supervision, help represent clients in court. Since launching in 2006, the project has driven statewide reforms and freed hundreds of people who would otherwise die in prison.

Romano’s efforts began on a case-by-case basis, devising new litigation strategies to free nonviolent criminals with harsh and disproportionate sentences. But in 2012, he and David Mills—professor of the practice of law, senior lecturer, and founding director of the law school’s Clinical Education program—took aim at the system itself. Together, they spearheaded Proposition 36, a successful ballot initiative that overhauled California’s Three Strikes law. The Three Strikes Project, which Romano founded and directs, was set up to petition the government to release all those incarcerated third-strikers with time served, one at a time.

The people they’ve freed have served decades for remarkably petty crimes—shoplifting a pair of socks, simple possession of a fraction of a gram of heroin, and breaking into a soup kitchen. One of the first people ever sentenced under the law spent 31 years in prison for taking a hedge trimmer and an extension cord from two open garages. 

Each new quarter working with students, Romano’s first-day list usually holds 20 names. His team and his students choose the cases they want to work on. “The truth is, we should represent all of them,” Romano says. “But we live in a world of limited resources.” 

The Three Strikes Project has prevailed in 80 percent of its cases, becoming a national model for addressing the excesses of past sentencing laws. For some, the value of the program is in restoring justice; for others, in lifting an unnecessary burden from taxpayers. Either way, the results are striking: While roughly 42 percent of California’s post-prison population returns to custody, not one of the hundreds of people freed through Romano’s team has gone back to prison.

Prop. 36 was the first of what legal scholars now call “second look laws”—legislation that authorizes judges to review and alter sentences after a person has spent considerable time in prison. Just as California’s Three Strikes law set off a proliferation of similar laws around the nation, and eventually a federal version, Romano and Mills’ effective dismantling of it has spawned what the nonprofit Sentencing Project calls a “second look movement.” Some 13 other states and the District of Columbia have adopted similar reform. 

California has remained at the leading edge of that movement. Since 2019, Romano has been instrumental in passing a suite of similar sentencing reforms as chair of Governor Gavin Newsom’s Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code, a kind of R&D policy lab for criminal justice reform in the state. (Twenty-four of the commission’s proposals have already become law.) Along the way, he also worked with the Obama administration on its historic clemency program.

All in all, nearly 19,000 people have been freed early from prison under the constellation of “second look” reforms enacted in California since Prop. 36 in 2011. Fewer than 3 percent have returned to prison for a new serious or violent felony. Today, nearly everyone in California prisons is eligible to have their sentence reconsidered in some capacity, and many other states have followed suit with “second look” laws of their own.

Professor Lawrence C. Marshall, a law school colleague and expert in legal ethics, says that Mills and Romano have “accomplished what many had believed to be impossible,” beginning with Prop. 36, which “reflected a true sea change, in that the people of California actually voted to reduce sentences—not enhance them—in many circumstances.”

“The project now occupies a solid place as one of the many Stanford Law School crown jewels,” he adds.

Second look reforms have typically garnered bipartisan support. Rather than being cast as radical attempts to dismantle the justice system, they are widely recognized as pragmatic fixes to self-evident injustices. Romano and his team have worked with prosecutors and prison officials to revisit thousands of unnecessarily harsh sentences. Even voters inclined toward “tough on crime” policies often see these sentences as wasteful, counterproductive, and out of step with common sense. That broad agreement—rare in today’s politics—is part of what has fueled the success of the  Three Strikes Project.

At Stanford, the work is defined less by ideology than by impact. Romano and his colleagues focus relentlessly on what works: using evidence, testing new ideas, and showing that a more balanced approach to sentencing not only restores fairness but also improves public safety. The results—thousands of lives restored, reforms that have become national models—have given people across the political spectrum a reason to come together.

That blending of rigor and pragmatism is quintessentially Stanford. For students, the project is a profound education in both law and empathy—sitting across the table from someone who has been crushed by the justice system and asking what can be done, concretely, to make things right. For society, it’s proof that even the most divisive issues can yield to solutions grounded in evidence and shared humanity. 

As Romano puts it, “We’re taking the good fortune we’ve had, and we’re applying it to mitigate someone else’s bad fortune.” It’s a reminder that Stanford’s greatest impact often comes when it turns big, thorny problems into practical paths forward.