Should We Buy Into His Madness?

It is no wonder that we stumble so often when we’re forced to decide whether someone is bad or (also) mad. After all, we barely speak the same language.

The medical world talks about mental illness. But the law only talks about legal insanity. The public wonders whether some defendant is mad as a hatter. The judge only has to determine if a defendant is competent enough to stand trial.

This is how it goes now in the case of Theodore Kaczynski, who appears to be both certifiably nuts and legally competent.

Was anyone really surprised Monday when the mathematician-turned-hermit, the accused Unabomber, interrupted the trial before it even began to read something he had written, something “very important”?

Was anyone truly surprised that he apparently protested in the judge’s chambers against being represented by lawyers who want to portray him as mentally unstable?

Ted Kaczynski did what he does best. He disrupted the system. If he is crazy, a former prosecutor told CNN outside the courthouse, then he is crazy like a fox. But this man spoke as if Kaczynski could not be both sick and smart, delusional and deliberate. A psychotic fox.

This is at the heart of the trial of a man who worried in his journals that society would see him as “a sickie” rather than a political philosopher. A man who has refused to see a psychiatrist, who has been found “competent” to stand trial according to that low legal standard and so is permitted to direct his own defense.

What does society do about a man who writes with clarity that “The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown.” And then tells his lawyers that he believes satellites control people and place electrodes in their brains. A man who is accused of deliberately planning and building bombs that killed three and maimed 29. But says he was controlled by an all-powerful organization he couldn’t resist.

Is Kaczynski as crazy as Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and ate his victims? As crazy as John Salvi, who killed two women at abortion clinics which were, he insisted, part of a conspiracy by the Ku Klux Klan, Freemasons and the mafia against Catholics? As crazy as Colin Ferguson, who killed 6 and wounded 19 Long Island rail commuters and said he was charged with 93 counts because it was 1993?

All of these men were found to be legally responsible for their actions. Indeed, Ferguson was allowed what Kaczynski may want - to conduct his own defense, even after he asked to put an exorcist on the stand as an expert witness, to testify that government agents installed a microchip in his brain.

Ever since John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan and was sent to a mental hospital, insanity has become a hard defense to muster. As Michael Perlin of NYU Law School says, “There is no question that jurors consistently reject the insanity defense in cases of people who were severely mentally ill and didn’t know what they were doing.”

It is raised only 1 percent of the time and successful one-quarter percent. Even then, it’s almost always when both sides agree that the defendant is out of his mind. Today, Perlin says, “Society wants to try just about everyone.”

The law holds people responsible for their actions while medicine tries to help those who are ill through no fault of their own. These two inexact sciences meet at the juncture where evil confronts illness. In a lock-‘em-up era, we have come to believe that insanity is a loophole for evil, not a diagnosis for disease.

David Gelernter, a victim of one of the bombs allegedly constructed and sent by Kaczynski, calls the Unabomber an evil coward who deserves to die. But the bizarre part of this story is that to declare him evil and go for the death penalty, we have to accept Kaczynski’s own view of reality.

We have to agree that the world he constructed over 20 years in a cabin in Montana is not the delusion of a paranoid schizophrenic, but the rational view of a political ideologue. Sending letter bombs was the rational act of an anti-technology terrorist, not a madman controlled by some omnipotent force.

Not only does Ted Kaczynski insist he is sane, but here is the clincher: The law agrees. Having found him “competent,” at least for now, he has won a degree of autonomy and power equal to the time when he forced his “Manifesto” onto the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Indeed, as Northeastern University law professor Rose Zoltek-Jick says wonderingly, “He’s dragged us down Alice’s hole. It’s as if he were forcing us to go into a world as crazy as his.”

This week in Sacramento, the Mad Hatter is running the show.