Lawyer: Kaczynski Wronged

Lawyer: Kaczynski Wronged

Kaczynski, Theodore John, 1942-2023 -- Trials, litigation, etc

Mello, Michael -- Authorship

David Gram of the Associated Press writes about Michael Mello's argument that the Unabomber should be allowed to represent himself. Mello disagrees with the state's decision to declare Kaczynski a paranoid schizophrenic despite Kaczynski's emphatic rejection of the label. Mello further argues that Kaczynski was evil, but not delusional as it took careful planning to execute his attacks.

Gram, David

Associated Press

HIST 299, University of Mary Washington

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300 DPI

English

South Royalton, VT

Theodore Kaczynski was improperly denied his day in court argues a Vermont law professor who won Kaczynski's cooperation to write a book about his case. “I do not believe that Theodore Kaczynski was a paranoid schizophrenic” as his lawyers claimed, Vermont Law School professor Michael Mello said in a talk Wednesday at the law school. Mello has
exchanged letters for about a year with the Unabomber, who is at a federal “supermax” prison in Colorado. Mello argues in his recently published, critically acclaimed book, “U.S.A. v. Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber,” that it was wrong to box Kaczynski into entering a guilty plea – even though [Picture of Michael Mello] letting him go to trial almost certainly would have ended in his execution for the murders of three people and maimings of 23 others with mail bombs. Mello said the case had raised “some of the most basic questions about the nature of attorney-client relationship in capital cases.” As Mello put them:
[Black Square] “Should court-appointed lawyers be allowed to force a mental illness defense upon a client who specifically and emphatically rejects it, and who is mentally competent to stand trial?” Mello argued New York subway gunman Colin Ferguson was far more mentally ill than Kaczynski, but was allowed to stand trial. [Black Square] “Can a mentally competent, citizen-accused be denied the right to self-representation?” U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. turned down Kaczynski’s request that he be allowed to dismiss his lawyers and represent himself. When one man in the audience, who identified himself as a physician, argued Kaczynski was a paranoid schizophrenic, Mello replied that a major part of the definition of that psychiatric disease is that the patient must be delusional. “Where’s the delusion?” he asked. Mello argued Kaczynski was evil, but that he had rationally calculated that his threat to send more deadly mail bombs would get his 35,000-word manifesto published in The New York Times
and The Washington Post.

Newspaper Clip

William Goodman