Written by and named after Senator Caleb H. Baumes, the chairman of the New York State Crime Commission, the sections called for the automatic life imprisonment of any criminal convicted of more than three separate felonies, without regard to the nature of the offense or any attendant circumstances.
[1] The law was made possible by the growing adoption and acceptance of fingerprinting as a method of identification by police departments, which began to replace anthropometry as the technique of choice in the 1920s.
[1] A serious challenge to the Baumes law concerned the case of a shoplifter named Ruth St. Clair, who was arrested for the fourth time after stealing items from a department store in December 1929.
[2] While the Baumes law seemed to remove authority from judges and parole boards by mandating sentences, they gradually began to work around it through the increased use of plea bargains.
In cases where a life sentence would have been unjust, prosecutors became more amenable to accused parties' guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges, which would not trigger portions of the statute.