Snopes.com "Urban Legends Reference Pages is a great site for checking out rumors, hoaxes, and stories that just don't seem quite right. Checking for something else, I came across its entry for The Twinkie Defense. The entry suggests that it was a distortion to say that Dan White's defense of diminished capacity due to eating Twinkies and other sugar-filled foods:
Neither White nor his defense team ever claimed that White's consumption of junk food had wrought psychological or physiological changes in White that caused him to act in way inconsistent with his "normal" behavior when he shot George Moscone and Harvey Milk. White's defense was that he had been suffering from a long-standing and untreated depression that diminished his capacity to distinguish right from wrong, and thus he was not capable of the premeditation required to support a charge of first degree murder. Dr. Martin Blinder was called as a witness by the defense to testify that the conversion of the previously health-conscious White to a diet of Twinkies and other junk foods was evidence of his depression. This testimony was similar to offering evidence that the habitual wearing of torn and dirty clothes by someone who had previously always been a snappy dresser was a sign that that person was suffering from depression.
Really?
I did a little research.
State v. White, 117 Cal. App. 3d 270, 172 Cal. Rptr. 612 (1981), briefly summarizes the testimony of six psychiatrists (5 for the defense, 1 for the prosecution), mentioning depression repeatedly but never mentioning Twinkies or sugar. But in law review articles, it is easy to find statements that White relied on his sugar consumption to establish his diminished capacity defense. The "Twinkie defense" is held up as an example of "junk science."
The most detailed account I found (in my limited searching) was in Eileen A. Scallen & William E. Wiethoff,
The Ethos of Expert Witnesses: Confusing the Admissibility, Sufficiency and Credibility of Expert Testimony, 49 Hastings L.J. 1143, 1161-66 (1998):
At the trial, White presented a defense of diminished capacity, using [precedent] . . . which held that evidence of diminished capacity, whether from intoxication, trauma or mental disease, could be used to show that the defendant did not have a specific mental state such as malice aforethought, or could not premeditate or deliberate to the degree required for a conviction of first degree murder. Thus, White presented expert testimony regarding his mental state at the time of the killings. This expert testimony was the source of one of the trial's most memorable images and one of the most reviled examples of "junk science" - the "Twinkie defense," as the press referred to the testimony of Dr. Martin Blinder. This defense expert testified that when White became depressed, he ate large amounts of junk food - Twinkies, Coca-Cola, etc. Moreover, Dr. Blinder testified that when "susceptible individuals" like White consume "large quantities of what we call junk food, high sugar content food with lots of preservatives can precipitate anti-social and even violent behavior." However, what is now forgotten is that the defense did not rely solely on the "Twinkie" theory; four other psychiatrists also testified for the defense, uniformly agreeing that White suffered from depression to such a degree that he possessed diminished capacity at the time of the killing and could not premeditate or deliberate.
Id. at 1161 (footnotes omitted).
Note that, despite the public attention and press surrounding the "Twinkie defense," no law reform was deemed necessary to prohibit that particular "scientific" theory. Indeed, when interviewed following the verdict, the jurors discussed the burden of proof and the prosecution's failure to prove premeditation "beyond a reasonable doubt," but none of them relied on "the Twinkie defense."
Id. at 1166 (citation omitted)
From this, it seems that White's defense emphasized sugar more than Snopes says -- but much less than the popular imagination (and law reviews) would have it.
Categories: Twinkie-defense, criminal-law, experts, juries,
