In Fits And Starts

There are many ways, some gruesome, some graceful, to kill yourself once you set your mind to it. Ted Kaczynski's attempt to hang himself with his underwear in his jail cell last week seemed a clumsy gesture compared with the convoluted strategy he has been employing in court. First he threatened to fire his lawyers if they kept insisting on portraying him as mentally ill. Then he argued that he wanted to defend himself. And that, lawyers observed, would probably ensure that he would wind up dead after all.

America's legal system is laced with protections for people who are too sick to know what they are doing or what is best for them. But as last week's proceedings in the trial of the alleged Unabomber showed, the law doesn't quite know what to do with someone who may be both crazy and cunning. The former Berkeley math professor managed, with his shifting demands and refusal to cooperate, to twist the case into a knot of conflicting legal rights that only a mathematician could untangle. Who should really shape the defense: lawyer or client? Can attorneys be forced to present a defense they think is virtually suicidal? If someone is sane enough to stand trial, does that mean he's sane enough to defend himself if his best defense is that he's crazy? Just what does the U.S. Constitution owe a mad genius? The confusion was so great that at one point Judge Garland Burrell Jr. said in exasperation, "I'm going to tell you what I think, and I don't know if I should think what I think."

It turns out that the only thing harder than finding the alleged Unabomber after 18 years, 200 suspects, thousands of interviews and one of the longest, most expensive manhunts in FBI history, is making him sit down and shut up. Theodore Kaczynski, lonely hermit, brilliant sociopath, murderous wood carver, has been fighting with his lawyers for months. They wanted to mount a mental-illness defense; he wanted no part of it. Kaczynski made it clear that he would do anything, even fire his attorneys, to keep them from portraying him as a "sickie."

So by last week his team had agreed to skip the mental-illness defense during the trial so long as the lawyers could pull it out in the penalty phase to help avoid a death sentence. They planned to show jurors photos of the ripe, shaggy hermit at the time of his arrest and offer a tour of the creepy cabin, which has been trucked in as evidence, all to give jurors an idea of the life-style of the man on trial. Burrell overruled Kaczynski's objections to this plan on the grounds that the lawyers, not the client, should be in control of defense strategy. "The standard for the conduct of criminal cases says that the client has the choice of whether to plead guilty or not, or whether to take the stand or not," observes Stanford University law professor Barbara Babcock, "but I don't think that the tactical decision of what defenses to raise is up to him."