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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

To be That Guy™, the Twinkie Defense isn’t just some dumb meme. It was literal defense used in double murder trial.

In 1978, San Francisco supervisor Dan White went into city hall and shot killed mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk.

At trial, he claimed diminished capacity because of a blood sugar imbalance because he ate some Twinkies. The jury ended up acquitting him of premeditated murder, and instead found him guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone%E2%80%93Milk_assassina...

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To be That Other Guy™, the problem with your contribution isn’t that it might be seen as pedantic, but that its also wrong.

> To be That Guy™, the Twinkie Defense isn’t just some dumb meme. It was literal defense used in double murder trial.

It is a dumb meme that has evolved around a misleading name a reporter gave to the defense at that trial, which has morphed into an myth about the nature of the defense that you now repeat as fact, despite linking sources explaining that it isn't.

> At trial, he claimed diminished capacity because of a blood sugar imbalance because he ate some Twinkies.

No, he didn't, as your own first source notes. His recent switch from being a health food nut to eating junk food (the context in which Twinkies were incidentally mentioned) was brought up as one of several external behavioral indicia of the longer tern mental breakdown the defense claimed he was going through, not its cause. And that longer term breakdown was context for the acute break they (and the psychiatrists called as expert witnesses) claimed White experienced that was the center of the diminished capacity defense.

To be absolutely precise, the claim, as evinced by the diet of Twinkies, that he was depressed, was still an absolutely outrageous, abusive and mendacious justification for the premeditated homophobic murders that he committed in cold blood. But it is true that eating Twinkies was presented as the symptom not the cause.

(I'm familiar with the entire saga.)

TL;DR: There was no need to mention it if it wasn't relevant.

It was a doublespeak pathos appeal while simultaneously feigning apology and taking ownership in order to dodge around the requirements of 1st degree murder under then California law. The media made only a small reductionist mischaracterization of the defense's strategy apart from the truth of what it really was: a red herring and a canard misdirecting blame away from the hateful, agro murderer who got a 7 year slap (-2 years for good behavior) on the wrist and topped himself 2 years later.

California's legislature subsequently amended statutes to make it easier to get convictions for 1st degree murder as direct result of this case.

not exactly. This misinterpretation of what happened during the Dan White trial is all the fault of Paul Krassner

https://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Myth-of-the-Twinkie-de...

A better summary is the defense presented an argument that Dan White was massively depressed (Vietnam combat vet, just lost his job), and eating massive amounts of Twinkies was 1 of the symptoms of his depression.

Dan White's lawyer appeared on an episode of Star Trek https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/11/us/melvin-belli-dies-at-8...

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