Prosecutors have rejected a bid by Unabom defendant Theodore Kaczynski and his defense team to plead guilty to charges involving four of the serial bombing attacks in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, The New York Times reported today.
The report, based mostly on an account from an anonymous source the paper identified as a "participant in high-level Justice Department proceedings," also said that Kaczynski has approached the Sacramento, California, federal judge presiding in the case with concerns about his court-appointed attorneys.
The trial of the former mathematics professor, arrested last year as the suspect in the 1978-1995 bombings, is scheduled to begin next Monday. He faces charges in four of the 16 Unabom attacks: one that killed a Sacramento computer-store owner in 1985; a 1995 mail bomb that killed a timber lobbyist in his Sacramento office; and a pair of 1993 attacks that maimed professors in New Haven, Connecticut, and Tiburon, California. Kaczynski has pleaded not guilty to all charges, a conviction on which could lead to his execution under a federal anti-terrorism law.
The Times source said a US Justice Department death-penalty review committee rejected an overture from Kaczynski and lawyers Quin Denvir and Judy Clarke to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison. Neither defense nor prosecution attorneys would confirm that such a deal had been sought.
Citing newly filed court documents, the Times also reported that Kaczynski had written to US District Court Judge Garland E. Burrell to complain about his legal representation. The focus of Kaczynski's dissatisfaction, the documents suggested, is his lawyers' determination to portray their client as mentally incapable of forming the intent to kill.
In the documents, Denvir said the disagreements with Kaczynski "had a long history" and were "obviously a major problem" for the defense. The chief federal prosecutor in the case, Robert J. Clearey, told Burrell that he feared the dispute in the Kaczynski camp could threaten the outcome of the trial by raising questions over whether the defendant has received an adequate defense.
"This is especially true," Clearey wrote to Burrell in a letter quoted by the Times, "because it appears it is the defendant's right - not his lawyers' - to choose which defense to proffer."
