Let me preface that I’m NOT defending him. He did horrible things and deserves every bit of what happened to him.
But I find the defense’s move to try to get him declared insane to be completely ridiculous and never would have worked. As the prosecution I would have used his manifesto as Exhibit A.
While I disagree nearly every part of his manifesto, and it is rambling, that’s just it, I disagree with it. Strongly. However, I don’t find it insane. Most of his arguments have been used by other people of sound mind. Not great people, but not insane either.
The only thing about him I find “insane” is that he lived off the grid and murdered people with bombs. But that’s the colloquial definition of insanity, not a legal one.
I don’t believe he was legally insane under some state laws. I’m not sure if there are any laws left like the ‘mental defect’ law that got John Hinckley off. He clearly understood that his actions would be considered wrong and illegal. Making and planting his bombs took considerable effort, they weren’t impulsive reactions to a mental illness.
OTOH, whether or not he was legally insane, to use the clinical term, he was definitely a nut case.
I believe he was evil. I think the way he tried to get his message out in a very stupid way that undermined his message, and pretty much made him a hypocrite. He could not have pulled off what he did without industrial infrastructure and materials. Had he waited a little longer and been a hypocrite using the internet he could have gotten his message across with, I imagine, some success.
I did not follow TK’s trial closely at all, but since the discussion is about a legal issue, I’ll just chime in to mention that ‘legal’ insanity is a particular kind: it’s generally understood to mean that “as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, the defendant was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts.”
This is meant to distinguish from a situation where a person is compelled by an ‘irresistible impulse’, or when a person is simply diagnosed with a defect or disease. The idea is that it’s not enough to say, “I did this because I’m crazy and can’t help myself” (since that is basically a carte blanche excuse for any addict to do anything), but rather, “Because I’m crazy I didn’t understand that what I was doing was wrong.”
In the context of KS, wasn’t his manifesto meant as a justification for his actions? If so, I can see an attorney, who is trying to craft a defense, decide to argue that KS had ‘convinced’ himself that he was perfectly justified or righteous. Of course, that could potentially apply to anybody who has reached a point where they’ve decided that their maniacal ends justify whatever destructive means they employ, so I’m not sure how it actually played out in his case.
I will note, though, as an aside, that KS was severely psychologically abused in experiments conducted on him while a teenage student at Harvard which were intended to humiliate him.
To be honest, I don’t believe there is such a thing as “evil”. I think evil people have some form of mental disorder, such as sociopathy. So yes, Ted Kaczynski was insane, partly for thinking sending bombs to people was an effective way of conveying his message.
Lots of people who have done horrible things have rationalized it in their mind. Kaczynski’s ideas were pretty solidified by the time he left Harvard (I believe 1968), he just hadn’t written them down in such an exhaustive way. He took a break for 6 years because he almost got caught, so I don’t think he had a Dexter-like irristible impulse to kill. He, at the very least, knew very well what he was doing was wrong in the eyes of the law, or he wouldn’t have gone to such extraordinary lengths to prevent himself from getting caught. I do think he had some sort of anti-social disorder, that was manifesting quite young and might have been exacerbated by the Harvard experiments, but I would note that even notorious serial killers who’ve done some extremely sick things never successfully plead insanity.
So, google tells me that he did not successfully plead insanity; rather, he pleaded guilty when prosecutors agreed to take the death penalty off the table and consent to him serving life in either a prison or a federal psychiatric facility. From the contemporary article, he was diagnosed as being a paranoid schizophrenic, but, as I said upthread, being ‘insane’ is not the same thing as being ‘legally insane’.
If KS had gone to trial, he would have probably been able to argue at the sentencing stage that his mental illness mitigated punishment, but it doesn’t look like he would have been successful in arguing ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’.
Kaczynski left Harvard (his undergraduate school) in 1962. He left the University of Michigan (his graduate school) in 1967. He left Berkeley, where he taught, in 1969.
How do you define evil? If he was schizophrenic and did the same things would he be insane or evil? Or both? But what is evil, is it choosing to commit awful acts? Is it supernatural influence of the devil? What is it, and what makes it different from insanity?
I might call ‘evil’ the desire and choice to do harm to others outside of the overwhelming influence of mental illness. A schizophrenic might act on the voices in their head due to the overwhelming influence of the disease. A sociopath who harms others for selfish reasons is not being overwhelmed by their mental illness.
I’m not sure where I saw it, and obviously I got the timeline wrong, but he did say in an interview that he was vehemently anti-technology before he started bombing. So it was not something he came up with after the fact to justify what he did.
But again, no “evil” involved. As TriPolar pointed out, there is the question of how to define it and I reject the supernatural explanations involving the “Devil” or whatever.
Evil means profoundly wicked or immoral. No supernatural involved. Many Nazi killers were ordinary people with jobs and families. No insanity (whatever that means) involved. So that leaves evil (profoundly wicked or immoral) as a better explanation.
OK, but what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home may be a great deal of fun and pleasure to them but in the minds of others may be seen as wicked or immoral. Who is to judge?
Reading your posts, I was wondering if Kazcynski committed some of his murders in Kansas, and was getting tried there. “I hadn’t heard he got tried in Kansas, but Moriarty knows what s/he’s talking about, so O.K…”
I found his manifesto interesting. Nuts, but interesting.
Evil, (the adjective), is something that is outside the bounds of accepted human behavior and causes great suffering. About the only act of consensual human sexuality that I would consider ‘evil’ would be this case from Germany (where else?).
If you like Terry Pratchett, go read, “Small Gods”, if you haven’t already. Neat exploration of that trope, and a bunch of others.
Richard Rhodes’s book on the Einsatzgruppen, and Nazi extrajudicial killings in general on the Eastern Front, “Masters of Death,” goes into the motivations for many of the participants, using the criminological research ofLonnie Athens in part. Particularly his Process of Violentization. I found his explanation convincing.
