He stole $50 and got life without parole. 35 years later, he's coming home.
At 22, Alvin Kennard was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
His crime? Stealing $50.75 from a bakery in 1983.
Now 58, Kennard is coming home after spending more than 35 years — virtually his entire adult life — behind bars. On Wednesday, when an Alabama judge ordered that he be released from prison, more than a dozen friends and family members who had gathered in the courtroom leaped to their feet and cheered.
“I fell apart,” Kennard’s niece, Patricia Jones, told WBRC. “I just threw my hands up and said, ‘God, I thank you, I thank you.’ ”
The unusually harsh punishment was the result of Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act, also known as the “three strikes law,” which was originally intended to crack down on repeat offenders when it was enacted in the 1970s. But Kennard wasn’t exactly a hardened career criminal when he was sentenced to life behind bars: His prior history consisted of being charged in connection with a break-in at an unoccupied gas station when he was 18, which landed him on probation for three years, AL.com reported.
Several years after that incident, Kennard and another man walked into the Highlands Bakery in Bessemer, Ala., wielding a knife, and emptied the cash register, according to court records. In 1984, Kennard was convicted of first-degree robbery. Because he had pleaded guilty to three felony counts in the gas station break-in, the penalty was a mandatory life sentence.
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