There Never Was A “Twinkie” Defense

Oh, how our world crumbles… I’ve known about “the twinkie defense” for years. It was one of those things rattling around in the back of my mind that I’d always accepted. It’s referenced frequently in pop-culture. I’ve referenced it myself jokingly and seriously. But, the thing is, there’s no creamy filling inside of the spongy-yellow exterior of this commonly passed outrageous yarn…

From Wikipedia:

The expression is derived from the 1979 trial of Dan White, a former San Francisco, California (U.S.) Supervisor who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978. During the trial, a noted psychiatrist, Martin Blinder, testified that White had been depressed at the time of the crime, successfully arguing for a ruling of diminished capacity, and White was thus judged incapable of the premeditation required for a murder conviction; instead, White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. This improbable defense was accepted by a jury that had been carefully selected by a skilled defense attorney to contain jurors who would be more sympathetic to Dan White than to Harvey Milk, in particular. White was known to be a devout Catholic, politically conservative, and homophobic. One of his victims (Harvey Milk) was the first openly gay man to be elected to a significant public office in the United States.

As part of this testimony, Dr. Blinder cited White’s uncharacteristic eating of Twinkies and drinking of Coca-Cola (White had been well known as a fitness fanatic) as evidence of this depression — briefly mentioning that this may also have worsened the depression. The unpopularity of the eventual manslaughter verdict (a lighter sentence which set off the White Night Riots) gave rise to the interpretation that White’s lawyers had used depression caused by Twinkies as his primary defense. Contrary to popular belief, however, White’s defense in fact argued that this consumption was unusual for him and reflected already existing mental instability; White would later commit suicide.

The “twinkie defense” was described in detail in Massachusetts Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. Woodall, 304 F.Supp.2d 1364, 1377 n. 7 (S.D.Ga. 2003).

From Snopes.com:

Here are excerpts taken from a random sampling of post-trial news stories about the White murders. Note that all of them erroneously report that junk food was claimed as the cause of White’s depression rather than as an indicator of his depression:

• [White] got off with voluntary manslaughter. The defense had argued that the refined sugar in White’s junk food had made him depressed and mentally incapable of premeditated murder.
• His defense lawyer argued that White had been clinically depressed and that his judgment was impaired by a steady diet of junk food. That strategy was dubbed by the media “the Twinkie defense.”
• His attorneys mounted what came to be known as the “Twinkie defense,” in which he argued that he suffered from diminished capacity because of the excessive amounts of junk food he consumed.
• At his trial, White mounted the infamous “Twinkie defense,” with lawyers arguing that his habit of feasting on junk food had left him with diminished capacity for reason.

Twinkies don’t kill people. People kill people.

[tags] twinkie, defense, urban, legend, pop, culture, debunked [/tags]