Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility
Dublin Core
Title
Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility
Subject
Unabomber Trial
Description
Discussion of the proposed prosecution and defence of Ted Kaczinski.
Creator
The New York Times
Source
The New York Times. "Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility ." New York Times, November 10, 1997.
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
1997-11-10
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The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
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300 DPI
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English
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Text
Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility
By William Glaberson
SACRAMENTO, Calif., Nov. 9 — A year and a half after a shaggy recluse stepped out of a Montana cabin and ended one of the most remarkable manhunts in American history, Theodore J. Kaczynski is to go on trial here this week on charges that he was the Unabomber who sent a chill through the country with a string of package bombings that began in 1978.
In Federal Court here, Mr. Kaczynski’s fight to avoid conviction and the death penalty will force his lawyers to contend with an extraordinary trove of prosecution evidence found in his cabin, including a carbon copy of the anti-technology manifesto the Unabomber had sent to news organizations, an unexploded bomb and detailed entries from his journals like “I mailed that bomb.”
And the case is likely to present the riveting picture of Mr. Kaczynski’s younger brother, David, taking the stand to try to save the life of the very sibling he turned into the authorities after reading the manifesto. It was David Kaczynski who went to the F.B.I. in 1996 and told them he thought his brother could be the man they were looking for.
But in recent weeks, it has become clear that a central theme, both inside and outside the courtroom, will be how to assess individual responsibility for acts that seem at once meticulously planned, and at the same time, fiendishly arbitrary.
The campaign that left more than two dozen people wounded and three dead was so irrational it could only have been the product of madness, some people including Mr. Kaczynski’s lawyers say. Arguing that Mr. Kaczynski’s mental deterioration rendered him incapable of forming the criminal intent necessary to be held responsible under the law, they say the death penalty would compound the irrationality.
But others, including the Yale University computer-science professor David J. Gelernter, who may be the Unabomber’s best known target, have begun to argue in public that the Unabomber is the personification of unrepentant evil and that only a weak nation would shrink from imposing the ultimate penalty.
Mr. Kaczynski’s lawyers have signaled that they may argue that
Continued on page A26
[image- cabin] Theodore J. Kaczynski, whose trial will begin in Sacramento, Calif., this week with charges involving serial bombings, lived in a small cabin in Montana for years without electricity or plumbing. It was there, Federal authorities, that say he made many of the package bombs that wounded more than two dozen people and killed three in the attacks aimed at stopping technology. In June, Mr. Kaczynski was led out of a court in Helena, Mont., before he was transferred to California.
Continued From Page A1
he was a paranoid schizophrenic. The prosecutors have asked the judge to bar that effort because Mr. Kaczynski refused last month to be examined by Government psychiatrists.
The debate will pit two images against each other. One is that of the mysterious figure with the hood and sunglasses in the much-circulated law-enforcement sketch of the Unabomber, so named by investigators because his first targets were at Universities and airlines.
With the help of elliptical letters and demands the bomber made to The Washington Post and The New York Times to publish his 35,000 word anti-technology tract, that hooded figure with the aviator glasses seemed to be making a bid for folk-hero status. Legal experts say that will be the image the prosecution will try to project to coax jurors into fury at a man they will portray as a manipulative killer.
The other image is the one the defense is likely to recall the jurors: the loner with tangled hair who emerged from the tiny cabin in the Rockies and who fertilized his vegetable garden with his own excrement.
“The prosecution is going to say, ‘Yeah, this guy is eccentric but so are all terrorists and mass murderers,’ “ said James B. Jacobs, a criminal law expert at New York University School of Law. “The defense is going to say: ‘This is a guy who lived in the woods. For years! He’s completely antisocial. He’s [a] paranoid schizophrenic.’ ”
In the battle of images, some criminal defense lawyers say, Mr. Kaczynski may be a victim of his own success. If he was the Unabomber, they say, he skillfully played to a segment of the populace that was suspicious of technology. The attention in the news media made him seem an enigmatic genius who meticulously crafted parts of his bombs by hand. In 1995, People magazine named him one of the most intriguing people of the year.
“He was presented as a pop hero, a rebel who was protesting the encroaching oppression of technology and he had a hand in creating that image. It’s hard to portray a pop hero as insane,” said Robert Precht, a defense lawyer who represented the lead defendant in the World Trade Center bombing case.
In the case before Judge Garland Burrell Jr. of Federal District Court here, Mr. Kaczynski, 55, faces charges as a result of the deaths of two Sacramento men, Hugh C. Scrutton, who ran a computer store, in 1985 and, Gilbert B. Murray, the president of the California Forestry Association, in 1995. In addition, he is accused of mailing the two bombs from Sacramento that wounded Dr. Gelernter at Yale in New Haven in 1993 and Charles J. Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco, in 1993.
Because the new Federal death penalty was not in force at the time of Mr. Scrutton’s death, Mr. Kaczynski will face the death penalty only if he is convicted in the 1995 killing of Mr. Murray. On Friday, Judge Burrell rejected a defense request to bar the possibility of the death penalty.
After the current trial, Mr. Kaczynski will face the death penalty again when he is to be tried in Federal Court in New Jersey for a 1994 bombing that killed Thomas J. Mosser. Mr. Mosser was an advertising executive who was killed at his North Caldwell, N.J., home when he opened a package.
[Image]
After jury selection, which is expected to take as long as a month, the trial will begin with a so-called guilt phase in which the prosecutors will be required to prove that Mr. Kaczynski not only committed each of the bomb attacks but also intended to injure his victims. If Mr. Kaczynski is found guilty, a second phase of the trial would be conducted to determine whether he would be sentenced to death.
Lawyers who have been following the case say they sense that there has been a behind-the-scenes struggle between Mr. Kaczynski and his lawyers over the question of how he should be portrayed. They believe that Mr. Kaczynski has been resisting the lawyers’ efforts to describe his actions as the product of mental illness.
These lawyers say that the two experienced Federal public defenders in the case would surely have advised Mr. Kaczynski that if they made a claim of diminished-capacity, the prosecutors would demand an examination by their own psychiatric experts. When prosecutors made that demand and Mr. Kaczynski refused, lawyers say, it was predictable that the prosecutors would try to bar the defense from introducing any psychiatric evidence and they did. Judge Burrell has yet to rule on the prosecution motion to preclude that evidence.
In this way, Mr. Kaczynski may have jeopardized his psychiatric defense, and that, the lawyers who have been watching the case say, may have been what he hoped. Mr. Kaczynski, they say, appears unwilling to go along with suggestions that his best chance to avoid the death penalty would be [to] portray him as mentally ill.
Mr. Kaczynski is represented by Quin Denvir, the chief Federal defender here, who is known as a consistent opponent of the death penalty, and Judy Clarke, the chief Federal defender in Spokane, Wash., who was one of the lawyers for Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who was convicted of murdering her two sons. Ms. Clarke helped to convince the jury that Mrs. Smith should not be put to death.
The chief prosecutor in the case, Robert J. Cleary, has been pushing strongly for the death penalty. Mr. Cleary, 42, the son of a retired New York City police officer, is the second in command of the Federal prosecutor’s office in Newark. He was appointed to lead the Unabom case by Attorney General Janet Reno.
At Yale, Dr. Galarnter said Mr. Kaczynski’s trial was important partly because of the stark debate it presents over personal responsibility. He stands squarely with the prosecutors who are expected to call him to the stand. “A lot of people in this country have a predisposition to believe that if you kill people with bombs, you must be insane,” said Dr. Gelernter, who was injured in one eye, lost part of his right hand and hearing in one ear. “We know that’s not true. We know sane men are capable of arbitrary bestiality.”
Some legal experts say that to draw their portrait of a troubled Theodore John Kaczynski, the defense lawyers may not fight too strenuously against the avalanche of evidence expected from the prosecution.
“Both sides have the same facts,” said Michael Mello, a professor at Vermont Law School who recently wrote a law review article on the Kaczynski case. “But they are going to be asking the jurors to draw very different logical inferences from those same facts.”
The defense lawyers may simply allow the prosecutors to tell their story to the jurors. It will be a story of a Harvard prodigy who grew up to live alone in a mountain cabin with no water or electricity and who is charged with assembling bombs that he would ship off to people he had never met.
By William Glaberson
SACRAMENTO, Calif., Nov. 9 — A year and a half after a shaggy recluse stepped out of a Montana cabin and ended one of the most remarkable manhunts in American history, Theodore J. Kaczynski is to go on trial here this week on charges that he was the Unabomber who sent a chill through the country with a string of package bombings that began in 1978.
In Federal Court here, Mr. Kaczynski’s fight to avoid conviction and the death penalty will force his lawyers to contend with an extraordinary trove of prosecution evidence found in his cabin, including a carbon copy of the anti-technology manifesto the Unabomber had sent to news organizations, an unexploded bomb and detailed entries from his journals like “I mailed that bomb.”
And the case is likely to present the riveting picture of Mr. Kaczynski’s younger brother, David, taking the stand to try to save the life of the very sibling he turned into the authorities after reading the manifesto. It was David Kaczynski who went to the F.B.I. in 1996 and told them he thought his brother could be the man they were looking for.
But in recent weeks, it has become clear that a central theme, both inside and outside the courtroom, will be how to assess individual responsibility for acts that seem at once meticulously planned, and at the same time, fiendishly arbitrary.
The campaign that left more than two dozen people wounded and three dead was so irrational it could only have been the product of madness, some people including Mr. Kaczynski’s lawyers say. Arguing that Mr. Kaczynski’s mental deterioration rendered him incapable of forming the criminal intent necessary to be held responsible under the law, they say the death penalty would compound the irrationality.
But others, including the Yale University computer-science professor David J. Gelernter, who may be the Unabomber’s best known target, have begun to argue in public that the Unabomber is the personification of unrepentant evil and that only a weak nation would shrink from imposing the ultimate penalty.
Mr. Kaczynski’s lawyers have signaled that they may argue that
Continued on page A26
[image- cabin] Theodore J. Kaczynski, whose trial will begin in Sacramento, Calif., this week with charges involving serial bombings, lived in a small cabin in Montana for years without electricity or plumbing. It was there, Federal authorities, that say he made many of the package bombs that wounded more than two dozen people and killed three in the attacks aimed at stopping technology. In June, Mr. Kaczynski was led out of a court in Helena, Mont., before he was transferred to California.
Continued From Page A1
he was a paranoid schizophrenic. The prosecutors have asked the judge to bar that effort because Mr. Kaczynski refused last month to be examined by Government psychiatrists.
The debate will pit two images against each other. One is that of the mysterious figure with the hood and sunglasses in the much-circulated law-enforcement sketch of the Unabomber, so named by investigators because his first targets were at Universities and airlines.
With the help of elliptical letters and demands the bomber made to The Washington Post and The New York Times to publish his 35,000 word anti-technology tract, that hooded figure with the aviator glasses seemed to be making a bid for folk-hero status. Legal experts say that will be the image the prosecution will try to project to coax jurors into fury at a man they will portray as a manipulative killer.
The other image is the one the defense is likely to recall the jurors: the loner with tangled hair who emerged from the tiny cabin in the Rockies and who fertilized his vegetable garden with his own excrement.
“The prosecution is going to say, ‘Yeah, this guy is eccentric but so are all terrorists and mass murderers,’ “ said James B. Jacobs, a criminal law expert at New York University School of Law. “The defense is going to say: ‘This is a guy who lived in the woods. For years! He’s completely antisocial. He’s [a] paranoid schizophrenic.’ ”
In the battle of images, some criminal defense lawyers say, Mr. Kaczynski may be a victim of his own success. If he was the Unabomber, they say, he skillfully played to a segment of the populace that was suspicious of technology. The attention in the news media made him seem an enigmatic genius who meticulously crafted parts of his bombs by hand. In 1995, People magazine named him one of the most intriguing people of the year.
“He was presented as a pop hero, a rebel who was protesting the encroaching oppression of technology and he had a hand in creating that image. It’s hard to portray a pop hero as insane,” said Robert Precht, a defense lawyer who represented the lead defendant in the World Trade Center bombing case.
In the case before Judge Garland Burrell Jr. of Federal District Court here, Mr. Kaczynski, 55, faces charges as a result of the deaths of two Sacramento men, Hugh C. Scrutton, who ran a computer store, in 1985 and, Gilbert B. Murray, the president of the California Forestry Association, in 1995. In addition, he is accused of mailing the two bombs from Sacramento that wounded Dr. Gelernter at Yale in New Haven in 1993 and Charles J. Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco, in 1993.
Because the new Federal death penalty was not in force at the time of Mr. Scrutton’s death, Mr. Kaczynski will face the death penalty only if he is convicted in the 1995 killing of Mr. Murray. On Friday, Judge Burrell rejected a defense request to bar the possibility of the death penalty.
After the current trial, Mr. Kaczynski will face the death penalty again when he is to be tried in Federal Court in New Jersey for a 1994 bombing that killed Thomas J. Mosser. Mr. Mosser was an advertising executive who was killed at his North Caldwell, N.J., home when he opened a package.
[Image]
After jury selection, which is expected to take as long as a month, the trial will begin with a so-called guilt phase in which the prosecutors will be required to prove that Mr. Kaczynski not only committed each of the bomb attacks but also intended to injure his victims. If Mr. Kaczynski is found guilty, a second phase of the trial would be conducted to determine whether he would be sentenced to death.
Lawyers who have been following the case say they sense that there has been a behind-the-scenes struggle between Mr. Kaczynski and his lawyers over the question of how he should be portrayed. They believe that Mr. Kaczynski has been resisting the lawyers’ efforts to describe his actions as the product of mental illness.
These lawyers say that the two experienced Federal public defenders in the case would surely have advised Mr. Kaczynski that if they made a claim of diminished-capacity, the prosecutors would demand an examination by their own psychiatric experts. When prosecutors made that demand and Mr. Kaczynski refused, lawyers say, it was predictable that the prosecutors would try to bar the defense from introducing any psychiatric evidence and they did. Judge Burrell has yet to rule on the prosecution motion to preclude that evidence.
In this way, Mr. Kaczynski may have jeopardized his psychiatric defense, and that, the lawyers who have been watching the case say, may have been what he hoped. Mr. Kaczynski, they say, appears unwilling to go along with suggestions that his best chance to avoid the death penalty would be [to] portray him as mentally ill.
Mr. Kaczynski is represented by Quin Denvir, the chief Federal defender here, who is known as a consistent opponent of the death penalty, and Judy Clarke, the chief Federal defender in Spokane, Wash., who was one of the lawyers for Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who was convicted of murdering her two sons. Ms. Clarke helped to convince the jury that Mrs. Smith should not be put to death.
The chief prosecutor in the case, Robert J. Cleary, has been pushing strongly for the death penalty. Mr. Cleary, 42, the son of a retired New York City police officer, is the second in command of the Federal prosecutor’s office in Newark. He was appointed to lead the Unabom case by Attorney General Janet Reno.
At Yale, Dr. Galarnter said Mr. Kaczynski’s trial was important partly because of the stark debate it presents over personal responsibility. He stands squarely with the prosecutors who are expected to call him to the stand. “A lot of people in this country have a predisposition to believe that if you kill people with bombs, you must be insane,” said Dr. Gelernter, who was injured in one eye, lost part of his right hand and hearing in one ear. “We know that’s not true. We know sane men are capable of arbitrary bestiality.”
Some legal experts say that to draw their portrait of a troubled Theodore John Kaczynski, the defense lawyers may not fight too strenuously against the avalanche of evidence expected from the prosecution.
“Both sides have the same facts,” said Michael Mello, a professor at Vermont Law School who recently wrote a law review article on the Kaczynski case. “But they are going to be asking the jurors to draw very different logical inferences from those same facts.”
The defense lawyers may simply allow the prosecutors to tell their story to the jurors. It will be a story of a Harvard prodigy who grew up to live alone in a mountain cabin with no water or electricity and who is charged with assembling bombs that he would ship off to people he had never met.
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The New York Times, “Unabom Trial to Explore Sanity and Responsibility,” HIST299, accessed July 4, 2024, http://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/282.