David Gengler’s request for post conviction relief is partially based on the argument that diabetes caused him not to be able to think straight when he agreed to plea no contest to the charges against him.
Gengler said he was not diagnosed with diabetes until he came to the intake unit of the state prison system to begin serving his 33-year prison sentence.
A defense based on diminished capacity is permitted in some U.S. courts, and has, at times, relied on an “altered state of mind” brought on by diabetes.
The argument is somewhat similar to the infamous “Twinkie defense” case, in which diminished capacity was blamed on abnormally high sugar levels.
The case involved Dan White, a former San Francisco city supervisor, who came to the city hall and gunned down Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in November 1978. White was angry with the two officials for not supporting his request to be allowed to retake his seat on the Board of Supervisors. He had resigned the position less than two weeks earlier.
When White, a former San Francisco cop and fireman, went on trial for the double murder, his attorney mounted a defense based partly on diminished capacity. The attorney claimed in part that White’s depression led to an addiction to junk foods with a high sugar content that, in turn, affected his judgment.
Twinkies, a snack cake containing a substantial amount of sugar — was one of the “junk food” items mentioned in passing during the trial.
White’s lawyer never argued consumption of Twinkies was the direct cause of his client’s mental problems, but did claim his over-the-top consumption of high sugar level foods was symptomatic of his client’s underlying depression, which short-circuited his mental processes.
Even though the main defense argument was White’s depressed-state-of-mind, reporters covering the trial dubbed it the “Twinkie defense,” and the name stuck.
The jury apparently bought into the argument, at least partially. White was convicted of the lesser charge of voluntary man slaughter and sentenced to prison for seven years and eight months.
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia mentioned the “Twinkie defense” during oral arguments in a case before the nation’s highest court dealing with the right of a person to have the attorney of his/her choice. “I don’t want a competent lawyer on my side. I want a lawyer who will get me off. I want a lawyer who will invent the ‘Twinkie defense’. I would not consider that defense the invention of a competent lawyer, which is one reason I don’t want a competent lawyer. I want a lawyer who is going to win for me.”
White was released from Soledad State Prison in January 1984, after serving slightly more than five years of his sentence. He killed himself in late October 1985 by attaching a hose to the exhaust of his wife’s car and running it into the passenger compartment.
The coroner ruled his death a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. He was 39 years old.
There have been other trials where diabetes has been pointed to as a reason defendants have not been thinking straight when committing criminal acts. A significant number of references to those cases detail how high-or-low-levels of sugar can diminish a person’s ability to think and act rationally.
California did away with the term “diminished capacity” largely because of negative publicity flowing from the White case.
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