Prosecutors rebuff Kaczynski claims

Prosecutors rebuff Kaczynski claims

Government insists Unabomber made a voluntary plea

By Jon Bonné MSNBC


March 2 — Theodore Kaczynski was “fully aware” of the terms and consequences of his guilty plea when he agreed to it, federal prosecutors insisted Thursday. Moreover, they argued, the lawyers who defended the man known as the Unabomber had every right to decide whether to use mental health experts during his trial, something Kaczynski said he found “unendurable.”

‘A guilty plea is not involuntary even if it is motivated by considerations far more compelling than an aversion to being portrayed as suffering from mental illness.’
— U.S. ATTORNEY'S BRIEF

“KACZYNSKI PLEADED GUILTY knowing of the consequences of his plea,” prosecutors wrote. “He was not threatened or coerced, and his attorneys did not deceive him in any way that affected his decision to plead.”
The prosecutors’ statements came in in a response to a handwritten appeal Kaczynski filed last December with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, in which he insisted he was coerced into accepting a plea agreement and he asked for a new trial. He initially asked U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell, who presided over his abortive trial in 1997 and early 1998, to throw out his plea and grant a new trial at which Kaczynski would presumably be able to present a defense based on his anti-science beliefs.
Kaczynski insisted that he had been railroaded and deceived by his defense team, led by veteran public defenders Quin Denvir and Judy Clarke. Kaczynski and his lawyers battled throughout December 1997, as his trial got under way, until they reached a seeming accord and agreed not to present expert testimony from psychiatrists or other mental health professionals during the guilt phase of his trial — but would present it during a possible death-penalty phase.
However, Kaczynski soon came back to the court early in January 1998 and said he had learned his attorneys could present non-expert testimony about his mental state. This was not acceptable to Kaczynski, who said in his appeal to the Ninth Circuit that he was terrified he would be portrayed by his lawyers as a “grotesque and repellant lunatic.”

GOVERNMENT: KACZYNSKI NEVER COERCED
Prosecutors also rebuffed Kaczysnki’s claim that he was forced into his plea. He claimed his plea was actually made against his will; that he was pressed into it by a combination of his defense team’s maneuvering to get testimony about his mental health into the trial, and Burrell’s refusal either to let Kaczynski represent himself or to switch to noted San Francisco defense lawyer J. Tony Serra, who agreed to represent Kaczynski but said he would need several months to prepare a case.
However, they insisted, at the time he accepted the terms of the plea, Kaczynski knew Burrell had decided that Denvir and Clarke could present mental health evidence and had shot down Kaczynski’s attempts to serve as his own lawyer.
“Thus, when Kaczynski pleaded guilty,” they wrote, “he was fully aware of the rulings he now claims coerced him into pleading guilty.”
Moreover, they insisted, Kaczynski’s lack of comfort with the strategy, and his willingness to plead guilty after studied consideration of his options, would be a poor reason to give Kaczynski another chance to enter a courtroom and hold forth.
“A guilty plea is not involuntary even if it is motivated by considerations far more compelling than an aversion to being portrayed as suffering from mental illness,” they wrote.

LAST-DITCH EFFORT TO DELAY?

Moreover, they noted, his request to represent himself came after repeated denials that he wished to do just that, and was made some six weeks after jury selection began. Kaczynski’s plea deal offered him a life sentence in prison and no options for appeal in return for sparing him from a likely death sentence. He is currently serving his term in the “Supermax” federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo., having pleaded to thirteen counts involving five bombing attacks.
He was accused of a series of bombing attacks that spanned two decades, killed three and injured 29.
“If he believed his plea had been improperly coerced by the district court’s legal rulings, he should have spoken up when the district court directly asked him whether he was entering his plea voluntarily,” they wrote.
Among the key factors they point to is the overwhelming strength of their case against Kaczynski. Such was the evidence collected against him by a team of dozens of FBI agents since 1978, when Kaczynski’s bombing spree began, that the issue of his guilt was effectively not in doubt. His trial was expected to be a rumination on whether he was sane — whether he had a rational intent to commit his string of bombings. Indeed, the nature of the evidence was such, they argued, that Kaczynski knew the steep odds he faced not only to win an acquittal, but even to escape death. It was, prosecutors argued Thursday, “the most rational choice among his alternatives.”

LARGER ISSUE AT STAKE

The appeals court must evaluate three issues in considering Kaczynski’s request: whether his plea was voluntary; whether he was unfairly denied the opportunity to represent himself at his trial; and whether a defendant in his situation has the right to make decisions about presenting evidence about his mental health.
The third issue is of special interest to many defense lawyers around the country who want to see how a court sides when it comes to whether an attorney or a client gets to make strategic decisions. Prosecutors pointed out that the specific trial strategy which so upset Kaczynski — testimony by non-experts about whether he could possibly have intended, rationally, to commit his crimes — was a minor point in an overall defense and thus should have been left up to Kaczynski’s lawyers.
The government was also dismissive of Kaczynski’s claim that any testimony during the trial about his mental state would be an invasion of his privacy. Noting the voluminous amounts of evidence federal agents collected from Kaczynski’s rural Montana shack, including stacks of journals, letters and other writings, the prosecutors insisted that “his attorneys’ strategy would have revealed little or nothing about his private life that had not already been made public.”