So back to Dan White, the San Francisco city supervisor who had been let go–and had returned to plow bullets into Mayor George Moscone and his own supervisor, Harvey Milk. And how he got away with, well, murder.
To make a complex story somewhat less so, White definitely did not see eye-to-eye with Milk, his boss, who was a happy man when White resigned. But White reversed his resignation and tried to garner support from Moscone to go over the head of Milk. Ultimately Moscone refused, under Milk’s persuasion, and in November of 1978 Dan White headed to San Francisco City Hill with the express intention of killing Milk and Moscone, which he did most handily, by shooting both men in their bodies, and then twice each in their heads when they fell.
Anyway, the interesting part comes next. White, who had premeditated that assassination as much as anyone guilty of murder, pleaded not guilty by reason of reduced capacity. What reduced the aforesaid capacity? His recurrent depression.
But that wasn’t really enough. I mean, many people are depressed–and by far the vast majority of them don’t go out and kill their bosses [tempting as that may sound at times].
So a defense expert witness, psychiatrist Martin Blinder, bolstered this with what later become known as the Twinkie Defense. White’s episodes of depression, claimed Dr. Blinder, were made worse by the fact that “whenever he felt things were not going right, he would abandon his usual program of exercise and good nutrition and start gorging himself on junk foods: Twinkies, Coca Cola” [see the Trial Testimony of Dr. Martin Blinder (defense psychiatrist) at http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/milk/blindertestimony.html].
White had been in a funk–a junk-food infested funk–the entire time his job was at stake, but when he definitively found out that he was not getting his job back, he sat up the entire night, “drinking copious quantities of soda pop and eating high-sugar cupcakes and candy bars” (See Trials of an Expert Witness by Dr. Harold L. Klawans).
And that, thought the jury, was good enough reason to find extenuating circumstances for White’s crime, due to his diminished capacity.
Now, if replacing a healthy diet with one of junk food is so damaging to a man’s depression it could, in a convoluted leap of logic, lead him to murder–mightn’t it just possibly be bad for you, too?
