The Unabomber’ 96 Presidential Write In Campaign

Ted’s Letter correspondence with Lydia

From Lydia to Ted — August 24, 1997

Theodore Kaczynski
c/o Scharlette Holdman
529 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94114

Dear Ted:

I wanted to write to let you know that I am going to cease organizing efforts around the trial unless called upon by you or Scharlette. Unfortunately I just sent a huge batch of stuff to you, which I’m sure is unwelcome, and I’m sorry about that. I hope that I have not been harmful to you. Just so you know, I have never represented to anyone that our organizing efforts are approved of or connected to you in any way. I think I’ve told you that last year’s year’s “campaign” originated from the manifesto and the fugitive “FC” in September of 95, and was always kept separate from you.

It has been difficult to know how or whether to proceed, and and I guess I made the wrong decision. But I was equally afraid that sitting still would be a wrong decision too. I will understand more as events unfold, and I hope that you manage to control the trial according to your goals. I do not, and may never know whether or how you are related to the work I’ve been doing, and that uncertainty and non-connection has been part of the paradox of doing it. I realize that I am only one element in the public response that you have had to deal with and that I have been operating in the dark. Actually, I feel pretty bad about my judgment at this point.

I hope you also realize that my long-term concern with the ideas raised by these events is my sincere motivation. I will continue working on this in other ways, and I think I will do better work for having gone through these past two years. I will probably continue to use an ‘arty’ goofy approach because it’s a conscious, rational tactic which I believe generates some unique possibilities.

I may pop you general interest things now and then, because I still assume it’s nice to get mail, but just as a member of the well-wishing public from now on-not the kind of personally demanding letters I’ve sent you in the past. I wish you all the strength and firmness symbolized by my little heaven symbol on the posters.

Sincerely and with good wishes,

Lydia

From Quin Denvir to Lydia — September 18, 1997

Quin Denvir
Federal Defender

Dennis S. Waks
Chief Assistant Defender

September 18, 1997

Lydia Eccles
P. 0. Box 120494
Boston, Massachusetts 02112

Dear Ms. Eccles:

We have received your latest letter to Mr. Kaczynski regarding your organizing and publicity efforts. We appreciate the fact that you are being so cooperative in this respect. There is no need for you to worry about your past publicity efforts; no harm has been done.

Mr. Kaczynski appreciates your messages of support. Perhaps Mr. Kaczynski will be able to correspond with you directly at some time in the future.

Sincerely,
[signed]
Quin Denvir

QD: jk

From Lydia to Ted — Unknown date

THEODORE JOHN KACZYNSKI
#04475–046, P.O. Box 8500, Florence
Colorado 81226–8500 USA

I let myself go, very, very gradually, letting my arms take the strain, till I reached the ground. There was no moonlight but the sky was brilliantly clear...

-La Vida-

BENVENUTO CELLINI was born in Florence in the year 1500, where he spent the early years of his life training to be a goldsmith. With his love of beauty — especially the beauty of the human form — went a delight in craftsmanship and difficult achievement. Even his liking for warfare was a delight in dramatic execution and skillful effect. His “Life” has taken its place as the most notorious of all autobiographies.

From Lydia to Ted — Nov.4.1997

Theodore Kaczynski
c/o Scharlette Holdman
529 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA

Dear Ted:

John tells me that the trial begins on November 12, and that he will be there. I am a bookkeeper, so I am very tied up with year end things for my “clients” (!) (they have to spend all their money before the year end, float checks, then rush money back into their bank accounts in time to make the first payroll in January), there fore I am hoping to come at some point after Christmas. I really am not interested in seeing the prosecution at work anyway. Of course, after writing to you about the insanity defense I then read that you were not cooperating with prosecution mental examiners, so obviously I don’t really know what the heck is going on! Sorry to be presumptuous as usual.

I hope that you are not having to be medicated to support your legal defense. I feel that one of the most important points (and ignored points) made in the manifesto is the manipulation of human identity through drugs and ultimately genetic “therapies”, which to me are just a logical extension of the internalization of coercive authority (from police to progaganda to physicians). I am studying this right now as it unfolds in Massachusetts, where Elli Lilly, manufactureres of the pacifier PROZAC, have just given grants to the state to fund state public service announcements advocating drug therapy for depression. Elli Lilly is very actively engages in crossing the line to genetic manipulations, and is partners with Monsanto, global “pioneer” in agriculture genetic engineering and admininstration of drugs to farm animals, bovine growth hormone, etc. “We are the veal” indeed! Anyway, it occurred to me that perhaps your strategy might entail being prescribed anti-schizophrenic drugs, and I know that that could be very discouraging, since of course it makes it impossible to think clearly, concentrate, remember, etc. Hope not! But even if so, surely it would be temporary.

I continue to receive communication from people who are concerned about your situation and who wish to express solidarity with you. I wouldn’t want to overstate the numbers — most people do just accept the media point of view without much skepticism — but those who see through it really see through it, and care very deeply.

Well, I just wanted to write you a note before you have to step into the limelight of the trial to say stay strong, fuck the media, and very best wishes to you and Scharlette. I hope you’re not overwhelmed with dread. Thinking back to the time of your arrest, you have the capacity to radiate dignity and strength under any circumstances. As to personal stuff, however bad it gets, at least you re not Bill Clinton! Well, I don’t know what else to say, just want you to know that as the trial proceeds I will be thinking about you. I will try to send you interesting things, but I don’t really know what would hit home at this point. Maybe later I can get my friend Taylor Stoehr to dig up some unpublished Paul Goodman material for you. Or maybe some copies from a catelogue of German visonary artist Joseph Beuys. If I meet Scharlette I’ll ask her if you’d prefer literature, or maybe John can ask her what kind of things you enjoy getting. Or I could just tell you incredible and smutty gossip about my insane friends! I’ve been alienating them all lately, because I’ve been so depressed and impotent and enraged. Just read the SCUM manifesto. GOOD LUCK!!!

From Lydia to Ted — December 18, 2022

December 18, 2022 [sending late as usual]
Dear Ted,

I recently came across this long forgotten picture of me in my loft space taken in 1993, taken when I was working on a first amendment lawsuit brief against the subway system to prevent them from installing loads of advertising televisions in the subway station. I was working with my collaborator Wendy; we saw this state-sponsored system as a good chance to talk about advertising in general as diffuse propaganda; we had a lots of fun torturing the subway system with a myriad stickers satirizing “progress” under the project name, “You’re Soaking In It!” You can see the obvious pink, black and white reason I got excited about ISAAF when I got hold of that New York Times insert!!!

While many of your predictions are coming to pass, I am glad that you were wrong last December about not making to another Christmas. I hope for still another Christmas, at least, and that your writing and support network will be harmonious and productive in 2023... let me know if you want a book.

Love from Lydia [P.S. I am also sending you the card I made for Betsy this year.]

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Lydia’s Diary

4/3/96

11/9/97

Decided last night to go ahead with political support for Ted. This followed from having Green Anarchist list Unapack as the support Ted address; an article in the British Telegraph completely about Unapack; And a talk radio guy contacting me to do a two hour show in Salt Lake City.

All of this made me feel a sense of the press about to swoop down upon the trial, and knowing that they will check the Unapack page, and so will others who would like to commune with Pro-Ted people. I do not think it’s right to have this go down with out passionate political support for Ted.

I decided that the original intent of the manifesto was to activate people like us. It has been very ambiguous this lengthy wait. We kept thinking we would at some point know what the strategy was, and thus how to react. But with Ted nd[cooperating with the examiners, and with my impression that he has not be really cooperating with his lawyers advice all along — otherwise why would they wait until August to call us off? All of this indicates to me that Ted would like his ideas to be aired as much as possible. But from reading the biography, I also feel that he is probably in anguish at being in the spotlight and the object of acrimony, not to mention being thrown together with his family. But further, I don’t think that political support for the Unabomber can hurt Ted since it is not connected to him. And even further, my original reason for getting involved was my feeling of the importance of the anti-tech ideas, not loyalty to a particular person. I think that if I can accept Ted killing people to bust things open, then I can’t then say that cause isn’t as important as the off chance that Ted would do better without political support. I feel it is historically important that there be visible support for Ted. Without it there will be extreme demoralization of all radical anti-tech people, who will feel isolated and unconnected. This, afterall, is how it makes me feel.

Supportive Message

Command: Display message
Message 5/36 ravage@antenna.nl
Return-Path: <@antenna.nl: ravage@nnmag.UUCP>
To: unapack@paranoia.com
X-Link: WINDMAIL for LAN and standalone PC (nnmag.antennarnl)
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 17:05:52
X-File: UNABOM
X-Finfo: DOS,“UNABOM”,,,,Text
Subject: Ravage support Ted
Reply-To: ravage@antenna.nl
Priority: normal

Ravage supports Unabomber!

We like to express our support to mister Ted Kaczinsky. His life story as well as the Freedom Club’s manifesto have our uttermost interest. Being one of Holland’s well-known political-cultural magazines, Ravage is leftist but not correct. To us, the ideas expressed in the manifesto ‘Industrial Society and its Consequences’ have to be taken seriously by everyone who cares about the future of our planet and the quality of our daily lives. Therefore we pity the dubious case against mr. Kaczinsky: all attention is drawn towards him personally instead of the ideas which concern everybody, not only in the United States but all across the industrialized world. Whether mr. Kaczinsky MORE (you’ve seen 59%):is the Unabomber or not, the ideas show that time’s almost need to fight for drastic changes, or else human life will disappear in short . time. Ravage is happy that mr. Kaczinsky gains so widespread support from all kinds of different people. We’d like to encourage all of you to go on with your struggle.

Ravage, two-weekley action-magazine
Van Ostadestraat 233nn
1073 TN Amsterdam
Tel: +20–6761773
Fax: +20–6730595
email : ravage@antenna.nl
http://www.anatenna.nl/ravage

Associated Press Correspondence

From Lydia to AP

Subject: Re: STOP THIS TRIAL! KACZYNSKI IS BEING DENIED HIS RIGHTS (fwd)
To: rcole@ap.org (R Cole)
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 20:51:17 -0600 (CST)

Dear Richard:

I just e-mailed you our press release of yesterday. We consider this situation a crisis, and our priority is to put word out that the trial should be stopped, and there should be a delay for either a new lawyer-- specifically Tony Serra, who is willing to do a necessity defense--or for Judy Clark to prepare to represent her client according to his wishes. That he should be left with no alternative but to represent himself would be an outrageous travesty of justice, all the more so in a capital case.

I am unhappy that the media seems to be accepting the notion that Ted changed his mind at the eleventh hour. How do you know this?

He has been quarantined for a year and a half. Did Ted EVER consent to an insanity defense? Given how he is expressing himself now, do you think that he did? Remember that there were various motions to suppress, plea bargain negotiations, etc. Another question: When did Ted first attempt MORE (you’ve seen 26%):to contact Serra or seek outside assistance, i.e. Chris! is the history of this rift? Is it true that he is too late and changing his mind? Or has he been unable to act, given the powerlessness of his situation? I hope that you will scrutinize that. It is all to easy to continue seeing each act of resistance on his part as more signs of mental illness.

I am bringing these things up because time is of the essence here, and if it is NOT true that Ted suddenly changed his mind on the first day of trial--this completely goes to whether it is legitimate for him to have a chance to start over with lawyers that are open with him and respect his wishes. To put it bluntly, I feel that he is being fucked by his lawyers. Thus he is now totally isolated and there is NO one to represent him --and he is helpless, because he is imprisoned, and cannot even write his own visitors list.

I realize I am reading alot into this, but I am very concerned that the media is not doing its job and taking a skeptical attitude towrard the proceedings and toward the defense lawyers. Particularly since the issue concerns silencing the political expression of someone who may have risked his life to voice his political concerns, concerns that he devoted his life to also in the way he lived, the things he sacrificed, and years of study and thought.
MORE (you’ve seen 63%):
We already know that he is not a master of social process/negotioation, etc. He has been living in isolation for years. To come out that and try to deal with the social aspects of being pressured and cajoled by some of the most competent lawyers in the country, etc.???

I think the media could play a critical role in preventing him from being railraoded if they, i.e. you were to try to shed some light on the history of this situation, and when and how the rift came about.

Thanks for listenting???!!!
Lydia

From AP to Lydia

display message
Message 2/3 R Cole

Return-Path: <rcole@ap.org>
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 17:06:58 -0500 (EST)
To: Unabomber PAC <unapack@paranoia.com>
Subject: Kaczynski Trial

Lydia. Not everyone covering the Kaczynski trial believes he is asking irrational last-minute decisions. It appears to me he has taken a consistent position for weeks, if not months, and his attorneys and Judge Burrell may have underestimated his commitment to that course. I have no doubt that he considers himself a political prisoner, not a mental case, if Dr. Johnson satisfies the judge that he is competent to stand trial and represent himself, we will presumably all find out. Thanks for sending your e-mail.

Unapack press release

15 January 1998

Unapack press release, Representing Ted Kaczynski: The Right to Assistance of Counsel, Michael Mello

NB: on the 18 January, The Sacramento Bee contacts Unapack to publish Mike Mello’s press release piece

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PRESS RELEASE (COMMENTARY)
UNAPACK: THE UNABOMBER POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE
http:WWW.PARANOIA.COM/UNAPACK/
E-MAIL:UNAPACK@PARANOIA.COM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: JANUARY 15, 1998
Contact: Michael Mello 1-802-763-8303 X2291

Theodore Kaczynski is being denied his day in court: Lawyers he does not want are forcing him to stake his life on a defense he would rather die than raise. In the guise of providing him with his Constitutional right to the assistance of counsel—“assistance” is the word used in the Sixth Amendment —the federal government has stripped him of the only power he has left as an American citizen: the power to have his case raised against the indictment, to put on his defense in a judicial proceeding where his life is on the line-not his lawyer’s life, not his judge’s life.

Judge Burrell ruled last week that Kaczynski cannot fire his lawyers and that those lawyers can raise a defense based on Kaczynski’s alleged mental illness—a defense that Kaczynski adamantly refuses. Kaczynski wants a “necessity defense”—a claim that his crimes were justified as part of his political war against technology on behalf of humanity. Federal law would likely preclude such a defense to the murder charges, and Kaczynski and his lawyers appear to recognize that he will almost certainly be found guilty of murder at the first phase of his bifurcated capital trial. The real battleground in United States v. Kaczynski is over penalty. And at the penalty phase of the trial, Kaczynski’s “necessity defense” evidence is admissible, in my view, under the Supreme Court’s 1978 Lockett decision.

Judge Burrell’s rulings turn the right to assistance of counsel on its head. They transform a Constitutional protection designed to shield a defendant’s rights into a sword that disembowels them. The whole purpose of the right to counsel at criminal trials—a right recognized since the infamous Scottsboro case in 1932—is to empower the citizen-accused.

Ted Kaczynski’s lawyers, however well-intentioned and paternalistic, are not “assisting” him. They are controlling him. They are strong-arming a man on trial for his life, a man the judge has already found mentally competent to stand trial—a ruling which means that Kaczynski is competent to make the important decisions in his case such as whether he will testify, whether he would accept a guilty plea, and whether to stake his life on a mental illness defense (a defense with little chance of success in this case). If Kaczynski’s lawyers feel so strongly that he is too crazy to stand trial, they should have asked the judge months ago to explore that issue in a serious way, not with a pro forma quickie psychiatric exam.

Now that the trial has been postponed until January 22, there is a bit of time for all sides in the case to step back, take a deep breath and re-assess their respective positions. The prosecutors should reconsider their unfortunate decision to reject a negotiated plea to life imprisonment without parole. The judge should sort out Kaczynski’s counsel situation, once and for all, in a manner fair to Kaczynski and least likely to be reversed on appeal.

But the deepest soul-searching must be done by Kaczynski’s court-appointed lawyers, because they are at least partially responsible for the disturbing events of last week. They must have known from the outset that their client opposed a mental illness defense. They apparently hoped that when forced—on the eve of his trial-to choose between going along with their defense or representing himself, Kaczynski would cave in. It was a gamble, and the lawyers lost.

The hard part about playing chicken is knowing when to flinch. Ted Kaczynski didn’t flinch. Left with no acceptable alternative, he chose to represent himself.

I hope that Judy Clarke and Quin Denvir will now decide that they cannot ethically abandon Kaczynski to represent himself pro se. He clearly does not waul to represent himself—and for very good reasons. He wants a lawyer willing to abide by his wishes.

His lawyers themselves now face a choice: To represent Kaczynski the way he wants and has a right to be represented; or to step aside and allow Tony Serra (who is willingto represent Kaczynski, without fee) to serve as Kacyznski’s lawyer. If they step aside, they should do so now—to allow Serra as much trial preparation time as possible. Either way, a continuance to allow time for trial preparation is absolutely necessary.

The real issue here, as elsewhere in the Unabomber matter, is power. Who decides what his true interests are? The man whose life hangs in the balance? Or his court-appointed lawyers?

I believe the choice is his. His superb lawyers’ job—their ethical duty as lawyers and their moral duty as human beings-is not to manage or control him, but to “assist” him in making his defense.

Judge Burrell’s rulings have put Judy Clarke and Quin Denvir in an ethically awkward position. They have acted in what they honestly believe to be their client’s best legal interests. But that is not the point.

The Supreme Court has said repeatedly that the legality of death penalty trials must be judged by the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Consider how our standards of decency have “evolved” from 1859 to today.

John Brown, the slavery abolitionist who raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859, was critical in galvanizing public opinion so that civil war became possible—if not inevitable. John Brown’s hanging by the Commonwealth of Virginia made him a celebrated martyr in the North, convincing the South that compromise on the slavery issue was impossible and so that secession (and war) were the only course—exactly as Brown himself had hoped and planned.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of John Brown—besides the subsequent vindication of his “crazy” abolitionist views—was his carriage during his trial and the way his lawyers respected him. At trial, Brown refused to allow his lawyers to raise an insanity defense (Brown’s family had a history of insanity). Brown knew exactly what he was doing when he raided Harper’s Ferry: attempting to incite a slave rebellion, a plan far-fetched but certainly not crazy (at least not to Virginia and the South, in the years following Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser rebellions and other slave uprisings). If Brown was crazy, then so were a number of prominent northern abolitionists. And, like Socrates, after Brown’s trial and death sentence, he categorically scotched the plans of his followers to organize Brown’s escape from Virginia. No, Brown insisted: His execution would do more for his cause than anything he could ever do alive. On this score, Brown was absolutely right, at least in the eyes of historians. Our standards of decency have come a long way in 139 years. But on one point they remain unchanged: Some things are worth dying for.

In a column in last week’s Boston Globe, Ellen Goodman asked rhetorically whether “the Mad Hatter” should be “running the show” in the Sacramento courtroom. My answer is, hell, yes! When he’s on trial for his life, it’s his show to run... with assistance of counsel, according to his right under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

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Michael Mello is a professor of ethics at Vermont Law School who, as a capital appellate public defender in Florida (1983–86), represented many death row prisoners, including one would-be political martyr — Paul Hill. He is co-author, with Paul Perkins, of a law review article, TEL) KACZYSNKTS DIABIES, which argues that admission of Kaczynski’s personal diaries constitutes unconstitutionally compelled self-incrimination, under the 1886 landmark Supreme Court case, Boyd v. United States. His memoir, Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment, was recently published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He can be reached at Vermont Law School, South Royalton, Vermont 05068 (802)763–8303 X2291.

Unapack (The Unabomber Political Action Committee) assisted in the conception of this statement of opposition to the legal coercion of Theodore Kaczynski. Much appreciation to Michael Mello!

Excerpt from ‘USA v. Theodore John Kaczynski’

Subtitle One of the Most Famous Non-Trials in History

Author: Michael Mello

Source: Criminal Law Bulletin, with Mello’s handwritten notes.

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… new lawyers might find a persuasive precedent in the 1859 story of John Brown and his trial lawyers.

Epilogue: Ted Kaczynski Speaks for Himself

On July 7, 1998, after this essay had been typeset, I learned that a theretofore confidential statementJbyTheodore Kaczynski—setting out his views on his battles with his lawyers—had recently been published in the^eriodical Live Wild or Die, in Berkeley, California.

The statement reads as follows:

INFORMATION CONCERNING THE CASE OF THEODORE J. KACZYNSKI, ACCUSED OF BEING “THE UNABOMBER”

For a matter of months preceding the beginning of my trial on November 12, 1997,¹ had been aware that my attorneys wanted to use a defense that would be based in part on supposed evidence of mental impairment. However, my attorneys have led me to believe that I would have a considerable measure of control over the defense strategy, hence I was under the impression that I would be able to limit the presentation of mental evidence to some items that at the time I thought might have some validity.

The first weeks of the trial were devoted to selection of a jury, a process that told me little about the defense that my attorneys planned to use. But in late November 1 discovered that my attorneys had prepared a defense that would virtually portray me as insane, and that they were going to force this defense on me in spite of my bitter resistance to it.

For the present I will not review in detail what happened between late November, 1997 and January 22, 1998. Suffice it to say that the judge in my case, Garland E. Burrell, decided that my attorneys had the legal right to force their defense on me over my objections; that it was too late for me to replace my attorneys with a certain distinguished attorney who had offered to represent me and had stated his intention to use a defense not based on any supposed mental illness; and that it was too late for me to demand the right to act as my own attorney.

This put me in such a position that I had only one way left to prevent my attorneys from using false information to represent me to the world as insane: I agreed to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for withdrawal of the prosecution’s request for the death penalty. I also had to give up all right to appeal, which leaves me with a virtual certainty of spending my life in prison. I am not afraid of the death penalty, and I agreed to this bargain only to end the trial and thus prevent my attorneys from representing me as insane. It should be noted that the defense my attorneys had planned could not have led to my release; it was only intended to save me from the death penalty.

By concealing their intentions from me and discouraging me from finding another attorney before it was too late, my attorneys have done me very great harm: They have forced me to sacrifice my right to an appeal that might have led to my release; they have also ready made public the opinions of supposed experts who portray me as crazy; and they have caused me to lose my opportunity to be represented by a distinguished attorney who would have portrayed me in a very different light.

Perhaps I ought to hate my attorneys for what they have done to me, but I do not. Their motives were in no way malicious. They are essentially conventional people who are blind to some of the implications of this case, and they acted as they did because they subscribe to certain professional principles that they believe left them no alternative. These principles may seem rigid and even ruthless to a non-lawyer, but there is no doubt that my attorneys believe in them sincerely. Moreover, on a personal level my attorneys have treated me with great generosity and have performed many kindnesses for me. (But these can never compensate for the harm they have done me through their handling of my case.)

Recent events constitute a major defeat for me. But the end is not yet. More will be heard from me in the future.

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