Unabomber’s Papers May Go Up for Sale

The government must try to sell Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s writings -- seized during a raid on his remote Montana cabin -- and use the proceeds to pay restitution to his victims, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

Kaczynski, who is serving a life prison term for killing three people and wounding 23 in a series of bombings that lasted nearly 20 years, had sought the return of his papers so he could donate them to the University of Michigan, which collects materials on radical social and political movements.

Federal prosecutors balked at relinquishing the documents, which consist of thousands of pages ranting against the evils of modern technology.

The idea of placing a mass murderer’s private papers on the auction block for the public to view and purchase doesn’t make sense to one leader of a crime victims group.

“I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy them. I really can’t,” said Marcella Nicholas Leach, the vice chairwoman of Crime Victims United. “Why would anyone want to read the papers of a crazy person like that?”

Government lawyers argued that his papers were needed as security to satisfy a court order requiring Kaczynski to pay $15 million in restitution to his victims and their families.

At the same time, however, the government objected to selling the papers at auction.

“Were the property at issue sold to collectors of ghoulish memorabilia and the proceeds applied to Kaczynski’s debt, the United States would be assisting Kaczynski in profiting from his crimes,” prosecutors argued when the issue was heard by U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell in Sacramento.

Burrell sided with the government. Kaczynski’s lawyers contested the ruling, winning over the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Applying the revenue from the sale of Kaczynski’s property, even inflated by his criminal celebrity status, to his restitution debt would benefit not Kaczynski but the victims of his crimes,” a three-judge appeals court panel said in its unanimous opinion Thursday.

The judges ordered the government to come up with a detailed, written plan to sell Kaczynski’s papers in a way calculated to maximize the return to his victims and their survivors.

If the documents turn out to be of little value, the court said, the government must return them to Kaczynski.

Lawyers involved in the case could not be reached Thursday.

The appeals court said it would appoint a lawyer, acting pro bono, to represent the families’ interests in the proposed sale.

FBI agents seized thousands of pages of journals and other writings by Kaczynski when they raided his cabin in 1996, following a tip from his brother that ended the nation’s longest manhunt. His bombing spree lasted from 1978 to 1995.

Leach, the crime victims advocate whose daughter was murdered in 1983, said she thought money was unlikely to bring the victims much solace.

“I think it would make [his victims] a lot happier if they would just execute him and burn the papers with him,” Leach said.

She was also doubtful that his papers -- despite the Unabomber’s notoriety -- could fetch anywhere close to $15 million.

Kaczynski, who holds advanced degrees in mathematics from the University of Michigan and who once taught at UC Berkeley, contended in his journals that modern technology was destroying human freedom.

In the year before his arrest, the New York Times and Washington Post published his 35,000-word manifesto, in which he railed against technology, saying it threatened man with nuclear accidents, war, invasion of privacy and carcinogens in food.

“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we had to kill some people,” he wrote.

In their appeal, Kaczynski’s lawyers described the seized writings as having “negligible intrinsic financial value,” though potentially worth more “due to its celebrity value.”

Over the years, Kaczynski’s writings have been praised by an assortment of anti-capitalist fringe groups in postings on the Internet.

Kaczynski is serving his life sentence at a federal prison in Florence, Colo.