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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

A Portrait Of Evil, Or Of Illness? Jurors Will See Different Views Of Kaczynski As Unabomber Trial Opens

Linda Deutsch Associated Press

Is Theodore Kaczynski evil or sick? That’s the question lawyers will address when they begin making a case to jurors in the trial of the Unabomber defendant.

Opening statements are scheduled to begin today.

Prosecutors are likely to portray the onetime mathematics prodigy as a calculating killer, an antitechnology zealot who rationally perfected bombmaking techniques until they were lethal enough to make his point.

Defense attorneys, though shunning a true mental illness defense at their client’s insistence, could launch a more subtle effort to show jurors that the university-professor-turned-backwoodshermit is not normal.

Kaczynski’s family - including the brother who turned him in - are waiting with potentially powerful testimony about his troubled life.

The most unlikely thing to be said in opening statements is that Kaczynski - accused of waging an 18-year terror campaign - is innocent.

His lawyers already have tried to arrange a plea bargain to save his life. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno refused to deal, showing the government’s determination to seek the death penalty.

And so one of the strangest defendants ever is going to trial with a very strange defense.

“The defense is going to try to show the bizarre side of Theodore Kaczynski,” said Loyola Law School Associate Dean Laurie Levenson. “To show he is not an evil person, they have to show he is a sick person.”

Kaczynski, who has refused to allow psychiatrists to examine him, has effectively blocked any portrayal of himself as a madman. That means defense attorneys will be left to present inferences.

“There will be an appeal to the jurors’ common sense,” Levenson said. “They know a sick person when they see one.”

Already, the defense is planning for the trial’s penalty phase. They filed notice Friday that when the jury begins deciding if Kaczynski should live or die, the defense will present psychiatric testimony.

Prosecutors, who will seek to use Kaczynski’s own prolific writings as their strongest weapon against him, complained Friday that defense attorney Judy Clarke was planning a show-and-tell display in opening remarks that might unfairly prejudice the jury.

They said she planned to show jurors before-and-after photographs of the defendant taken when he was a neatly groomed University of California professor in the 1960s and decades later when he was an unkempt, wild-haired mountain man living as a recluse in a tiny cabin lacking running water and electrical power.

The defense also wants to take jurors to see the little shack he called home, which was hauled to California from Montana as a trial exhibit.

Defense lawyer Quin Denvir has said that to enter that cabin is to enter the troubled mind of Kaczynski, a man he believes is a paranoid schizophrenic.

The prosecution indicated it will oppose use of the cabin as evidence, and said the proposed photo display “is meaningless without an expert diagnosis, just as a coded document is meaningless without a key to the code.”

Prosecutors have asked U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. to allow use of the defendant’s writings in the prosecution’s opening statement.

“If the quotes are allowed, the prosecution opening statement will be: ‘Listen to Ted Kaczynski hang himself,”’ Levenson said. “You will hear quote after quote from his writings. They will say he enjoyed killing and coolly and dispassionately analyzed how he did it.”

Among the quotes included in the prosecution trial brief were these:

“Dec. 11, 1985. I planted bomb disguised to look like scrap of lumber behind Rentech Compute store in Sacramento.” It then noted that the operator of the store was “blown to bits.”

The charges say the Unabomber murdered Hugh Scrutton, who died in that blast.

“After a long period of experimentation, we developed a type of bomb that does not require a pipe. … We used bombs of this type to blow up the genetic engineer Charles Epstein and the computer engineer David Gelernter.”

Both men were severely maimed in June 1993.

The trial judge said he will rule on admissibility questions, and other pending motions, before opening statements.

Kaczynski, a 55-year-old Harvard educated mathematician, is charged in a 10-count indictment covering only four of the 16 bombings attributed to the Unabomber. The government, however, will present evidence about all of the crimes and seek to link the defendant to the entire 18-year siege of bombings.