Monday, January 26, 1998

Unabomber's plea avoided unseemly trial

Theodore Kaczynski has confessed to his Unabomber crimes and, as part of a plea bargain, will escape the death penalty but spend the rest of his life in prison. As the brother who turned him in put it, this conclusion is "appropriate, just and civilized."

Some of those injured by his 16 bombs disagree, as do some relations of the three who were killed. They wanted to see him executed, and that's understandable. The man was a serial-killing terrorist, destroying lives at random in his mad desire to save the world, as he saw it, from the ravages of technology.

But it could well have been a travesty for the federal prosecutors to have proceeded with the trial when a guilty plea was available. Kaczynski is crazy. A court-appointed psychiatrist said he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Under the law, he could still have stood trial on the grounds that he understood the charges against him and could tell the difference between right and wrong.

He was nevertheless at odds with his attorneys about an insanity plea, wanted to defend himself and would almost certainly have made a shambles of any attempt at an orderly proceeding. Few could have watched and felt that justice was being done.

Had there then been a sentence of death, it probably would have taken years of appeals before an execution. The expense would have been enormous, and there would have been a sense of something amiss in the formal slaying of a person so clearly deranged, even if most Americans do believe the death penalty is sometimes justified.

Federal prosecutors could have had virtually the same deal of life with no chance of parole much earlier. In initially seeking a trial and the possibility of a death penalty instead, were they seeking to do what was popular more than what was rational and just? Kaczynski's brother said that when he gave federal agents his incriminating information, they had promised him the government would not seek the death penalty. Was the obligation to keep one's word being shrugged off?

Those are moot issues now, of course. The right thing has been done. Kaczynski will suffer a lifetime of imprisonment, and the Unabomber will not strike again.

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