Theodore J Kaczynski was born in 1942, brought up in Chicago and entered Harvard on a scholarship aged sixteen. Socially outcast, he graduated at twenty and became a mathematician in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, followed by a teaching stint at Berkeley. In 1969 he resigned, informing his family that he no longer wish to teach engineers maths which they would use to harm the environment. In 1970 he bought land in Montana where he would live for most of the next twenty-five years.
From 1978 to 1995, with small, handmade parcel bombs he killed three people and injured twenty-three. His early targets included universities and airports, earning him the sobriquet "Unabomber." In 1993 he wrote to the New York Times, proclaiming himself a member of the "Freedom Club", which he followed in 1995 by inducing the Times and the Washington Post to print an essay entitled "Industrial Society and Its Future", promising to stop the killings in return. The essay begins "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" and advocated a revolution which is "not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society." The radical tendencies of "leftism" are rejected; the author observes: "they usually justify their rebellion in terms of mainstream values. If they engage in violence they claim to be fighting against racism or the like."
The manifesto continues to define the "power process", which essentially is the process whereby we struggle to achieve goals and attain those goals " in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals." Formerly these goals were simple physical survival, but "in modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE."
The diagnosis is made: "We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions." The treatment is prescribed: "the two main tasks for the present are to promote social stress and instability in industrial society and to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system." And the end justifies the means: " In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people."
Kaczynski's younger brother David read the manifesto and found the concepts and language akin to his brother's. He informed the FBI under condition that his involvement not be publicised and that the government not seek the death penalty, two pledges broken in short order. To most people, evidence of Ted Kaczynski's possible madness would be the fact that he painstakingly built little bombs and proceeded to send them to computer scientists, engineers and other members of the business, science and technology community. However legally, the crimes themselves cannot be evidence of the mental state of the accused.
The defence case would stand on proving Kaczynski insane. And the evidence they would use would be his beliefs about society and his solitary, independent lifestyle. They were prepared to bring Kaczynski's shack to the trial in Sacramento and use it as evidence of insanity. Only a lunatic would choose to live in such squalor. But of course they could not bring the mountains, valleys and rivers that surrounded the shack. This is emblematic of the defence's case: they were trying to save Kaczynski's life by insisting that radical dissent, an ideological loathing of technology and industrial society, and a desire to escape from mass communities were all signs of insanity. Kaczynski himself was kept in the dark as to this line of defence, which evidently raises serious questions about society's, the law's and the mental health establishment's attitude to dissent and radically alternative lifestyles.
And from the start one lawyer was prepared to represent Kaczynski on his own terms; a defence based on "imperfect necessity" - a crime committed to avert a greater calamity. That lawyer was J. Tony Serra, who inspired the film "True Believer" and has a record of taking seemingly impossible cases and winning. Kaczynski's court-appointed legal team froze Serra out completely.
On January 5th 1998, Kaczynski's trial began in Sacramento. Immediately Kaczynski raised the issue of his legal representation. He had only recently discovered that his legal team had been planning to introduce testimony from psychiatrists who found him paranoid schizophrenic, and that against his express wishes they planned to use a mental-health defence in the guilt phase. Serra had declared his willingness to work pro bono for Kaczynski, and now Kaczynski indicated his desire to retain his services.
Judge Garland E Burrell, Jr., the trial judge, denied the request, deeming it "untimely" - the jury was selected, the witnesses were about to testify. He ruled that it was up to the lawyers to choose whether or not to pursue a mental health defence. Kaczynski response was to ask to exercise his Constitutional right to represent himself. The Judge ordered a competency exam by a Bureau of Prisons psychiatrist. The psychiatrist spent a week with Kaczynski and reviewing writings and the opinions of other doctors.
Meanwhile the issue of Kaczynski's sanity was being debated in the media. Debated would be the wrong word, since his madness, and extreme madness at that, was taken as a given. A Newsweek story on brain research , stated "Mental health is a continuum � one extreme might be a Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber suspect described by his brother's lawyers as obsessive-compulsive, out of touch with reality, delusional, antisocial and paranoid." Kaczynski, whatever precisely he might have suffered from, was not remotely near a clinical extreme of any mental disorder. Judge Burrell himself observed that "I found him to be lucid, calm� I've seen nothing in my contact with him that appears to be a manifestation of any such [mental] ailment." Dr Park Dietz, a government forensic psychiatrist who helped persuade a Wisconsin jury that Jeffrey Dahmer was not insane and therefore culpable, read Kaczynski's journals and concluded pertinently: "they're full of strong emotions, considerable anger, and an elaborate, closely reasoned system of belief about the adverse impact of technology on society. The question always is: Is that belief system philosophy or is it delusion? The answer has more to do with the ideology of the psychiatrist than with anything else."
In any case, when the Bureau of Prisons psychiatrist found Kaczynski competent to represent himself, and both defence and prosecution had conceded his right to do so, Judge Burrell ruled Kaczynski's request "untimely" - the trial would be further delayed. At this juncture Kaczynski changed his plea to guilty rather than proceed with a defence based on interpreting his ideas as proof of madness. In May 1998 Kaczynski was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The irony of this case is that Kaczynski's lawyers were talented, compassionate people, supported by anti-death penalty advocates who dearly wished to save his life. And the price they put on his life was dismissing his works and ideas and secluded lifestyle as manifestations of insanity. Choosing to isolate yourself from society may bring you unhappiness, but does it make you mad? Are sadness, loneliness and shyness signs of insanity, rather than the murders and the bereavements he brought to random families across America?
John Brown, now regarded as an anti-slavery martyr, hacked to death five alleged pro-slavery advocates (three of whom were almost certainly anti-slavery) in Kansas. In Virginia in 1859 he lead the raid on Harpers Ferry - a violent attempt to start a slave rebellion. In his trial he refused to allow his lawyers use an insanity defence, a wish which was respected and led to his execution, which helped bring about the end of slavery. Comparing Kaczynski to John Brown might seem offensive, but both committed unspeakable acts of savagery in the name of a belief. History now judges one as a near-saintly figure. How it will treat the other is anybody's guess.
