Dan White, diminished capacity, and a lasting trial nickname
Dan White's diminished capacity defense centered on depression, while a nickname attached to junk food became the lasting public story. White killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on Nov. 27, 1978. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, sentenced to less than eight years, and served five years, one month, and nine days. The psychiatric argument concerned his ability to deliberate, one of the requirements for a first-degree murder conviction. The distinction begins with what the defense sought to establish about White's mental state.
The defense in May 1979 argued that periodic depression amounted to a major mental illness. Psychiatrist Martin Blinder spent a day explaining how White's life had unraveled and only about two minutes discussing diet. He described changes including withdrawal from work and his wife, unshaven stubble, and a shift away from healthful eating toward Twinkies and Coke. These were presented as signs of depression. Blinder also said food could affect someone predisposed to bipolar swings and could deepen depression and bingeing. That discussion was one part of a much broader psychiatric portrayal, rather than an independent claim that a snack caused the killings.
Chief defense lawyer Douglas Schmidt's closing argument ran 24 pages. It admitted White's guilt and argued about its degree, saying psychiatrists found him incapable of the deliberation needed for first-degree murder. The argument also addressed heat of passion and its effect on judgment. Only two lukewarm paragraphs discussed sugary preserved foods. Schmidt explicitly declined to claim that such food changed personality or caused aggression, while mentioning a minority psychiatric view of some connection. That closing places diminished capacity at the center of the legal case and gives the diet discussion a much narrower place within it.
The reporters and lawyers involved remembered that distinction. Former Chronicle reporter Duffy Jennings regarded diet as a minor matter within the depression defense and said the media favored a snappier nickname. Schmidt recalled HoHos and Ding Dongs but no Twinkies; he doubted Twinkies had been mentioned and dismissed the episode as a minor witness contribution. Co-counsel Stephen Scherr suspected that the simple food explanation gave cover to people seeking to minimize and trivialize what happened. A contemporary Examiner piece by Jim Wood described a psychiatric heat-of-passion defense without presenting a sugar-rush argument. These recollections add different vantage points on the same courtroom emphasis: White's mental state, his deteriorating life, and the degree of his criminal responsibility.
The nickname then traveled through a different chain of events. Satirist Paul Krassner, writing in the Bay Guardian and later elsewhere, may have coined it. Writing the day after the verdict, Herb Caen discussed police support for White and hostility toward homosexuals; he also remarked that an attorney called it the Twinkie insanity defense. Newsweek spread the phrase weeks later. By September, legislators were debating diminished capacity; they eventually abolished it largely because of the trial, and conservative Democrat Alister McAlister waved a Twinkie during the debate. The snack became a shorthand that newspapers, including The Chronicle, increasingly treated as the defense itself, despite the much broader psychiatric argument.
The events before the killings carried their own political conflict. White resigned about a year after his election; with a family to support, he could no longer afford to earn only the supervisor salary. Moscone publicly offered White his job back if he reconsidered; days later, following appeals from firefighters, police, and neighborhood residents, White wanted to return. Liberals led by Milk then urged a liberal appointment, blocking that return. White believed he had been betrayed. White brought a firearm into City Hall and killed Moscone and Milk, facts the jury considered when assessing premeditation. He shot Moscone, reloaded, and killed Milk. That sequence became central to the debate over premeditation.
Juror Darlene Benton later said Twinkies played no part in the verdict. Jurors listed evidence for and against premeditation on a blackboard and struggled especially with White's reloading before killing Milk. The discussions grew loud enough that the jurors were taken to the Hall of Justice roof. On their last day, they used reasonable doubt to choose the lesser charge. Benton said witnesses testified that others also entered through the basement window and that then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein carried a gun into City Hall.
The aftermath moved beyond the courtroom. On the day of the killings, a peaceful candlelight march went from the Castro to City Hall. After the verdict, White Night rioters set police cars on fire and stormed City Hall. Corey Busch, Moscone's former press secretary and a family friend, was at the mayor's home when the verdict arrived and described the family's pain. Milk had told Pogash that numerous death threats led him to expect assassination. Busch believed the defense portrayed White as a victim of political and cultural change and that diminished capacity gave jurors a basis for the lesser verdict. Former district attorney Joseph Freitas argued that requiring prospective jurors to support capital punishment made the pool more conservative than San Francisco's usual jury pool.
- SFGATE, Myth of the 'Twinkie defense' — www.sfgate.com