Getting Off?

Depression as a defense

No one disputed that former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White took a snub-nosed revolver along when he went to call on Mayor George Moscone last November. Or that White slipped into city hall through a window to avoid the metal detector at the main entrance. Or that he pumped nine bullets into Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, killing them both. The only question for the jury at White's trial for murder was whether the defendant really knew what he was doing. At week's end, the jury was still out.

Prosecutor Thomas Norman had argued that White was guilty of cold-blooded executions. He had asked the jury to send White to the gas chamber under California's new death penalty, which can be imposed for multiple killings or for murdering a government official in retaliation for his public acts. The prosecution recounted that White had resigned his seat on the city's board of supervisors, changed his mind, and asked for his seat back. After White learned that Moscone was going to give it to a political rival instead, White went to the mayor's office and shot him. Then he shot Milk, an avowed homosexual who had frequently opposed him on the board. Norman told the jury that White had leaned over the prostrate bodies of his victims and finished them off with point-blank shots into their skulls.

The violent act by a clean-cut Viet Nam veteran and former policeman and fireman shocked San Franciscans. "If White had been a breakfast cereal," said one acquaintance, "he would have to have been Wheaties." But Defense Counsel Douglas Schmidt described White as a manic-depressive with intolerable pressures because of his heavily mortgaged house and his efforts to support a wife and baby from a fast-food stand. The defense made much of White's penchant for wolfing down junk food--Twinkies, Cokes, doughnuts, candy bars--a habit that, the defense claimed, exacerbated his depression and indicated a chemical imbalance in his brain.

White did not plead not guilty by reason of insanity, largely because no psychiatrist would say that he was sufficiently deranged. Schmidt asked the jury to find that White's "diminished mental capacity" left him unable to premeditate, deliberate, or harbor malice, the standards for first degree murder. One defense expert, Dr. Jerry Jones, told the jury that what White suffered from was "not the blues, what you and I call being depressed." It was genetically caused melancholia, "as if the world were viewed through black glasses." Another defense doctor refused to elevate White's condition to a mental illness. He maintained that White was "discombobulated."

Throughout the trial White sat frozen, staring blankly ahead. Occasionally he shed tears, but he made no attempt to wipe them away. It was a different picture from the outgoing politician who had firmly told reporters on the campaign trail that "crime is No. 1 with me"--and who staunchly supported the death penalty for crimes like his.

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