Reply #13: The so-called 'Twinkie defense' is often portrayed incorrectly. [View All]

[Julien Sorel]

White was found to be suffering from clinical depression, and the fact that he had been loading up on Twinkies and other junk food was used as evidence of that depression in his trial; it wasn't blamed for the killings itself. White's eventual suicide, by the way, would be further evidence of that depression. Nevertheless, after White's trial, it became extremely difficult to win a 'diminished capacity' case for the defense, as right-wingers (oddly enough, White himself was a right-winger) used the case to deride the entire notion of diminished capacity by mis-representing White's case. The 'Twinkie defense' has since become part of the zeitgeist that has led to the current atmosphere in our judicial system; things like the 'three strikes' law, mandatory sentence guidelines and so on all result from carefully orchestrated distortions of cases like White's. That the left went along with this stuff, in part because of White's homophobia, is unfortunate, to say the least.