Judge Orders Separate Trials for Kaczynski

Prosecutors will have two separate chances to convict Unabomber defendant Theodore J. Kaczynski, first on charges in California and then on a New Jersey indictment, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise decided that Kaczynski will face California-related charges in a Sacramento trial next year, with a separate trial to follow in New Jersey. Kaczynski’s lawyers had asked the judge to consolidate the California and New Jersey cases into a single trial in Sacramento.

The ruling, in effect, gives a bicoastal team of federal prosecutors two attempts to convict the accused mail bomber, whose alleged 17-year rampage killed three people and injured 23 others.

Defense attorneys for Kaczynski, 54, had argued that two sets of charges against him--a three-count murder indictment in New Jersey and a 10-count indictment in California that includes two murders there--should be combined into one trial starting Nov. 12. But Debevoise, whose court is in Newark, said that separate trials should be conducted where the crimes took place.

“While there may be a pattern to various bombings . . . each was a discrete and separate crime, terrible in nature, and there is no requirement that they all be tried together,” the judge said in a written opinion.

“The indictment charges a particularly heinous offense which had a severe impact within New Jersey.”

Debevoise referred to the 1994 murder of advertising executive Thomas Mosser, who was decapitated when he opened a package bomb in the kitchen of his home as he prepared to take his family shopping two weeks before Christmas.

In a pattern common to the Unabomber crimes, the bomber apparently did not know Mosser personally but perceived his victim as an enemy of the environment. A letter to newspapers that authorities attributed to the Unabomber said Mosser was killed because he worked for the firm of Burson-Marsteller, which the letter said helped Exxon clean up its image after the disastrous Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Burson-Marsteller has denied working on the spill for Exxon.

Assistant U.S. Atty. R. Steven Lapham in Sacramento, a member of the prosecution team, said that the government is pleased with Debevoise’s ruling.

The prosecutors’ victory came three days after Debevoise rejected their argument that Kaczynski should be tried first in New Jersey, beginning June 30.

In that decision, the judge said that the proposed date would unduly handicap defense lawyers trying to prepare for Kaczynski’s West Coast trial in November, which was set last month by U.S. Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. of Sacramento.

Defense lawyers for Kaczynski, a brilliant but eccentric recluse who was arrested in April at his Montana cabin, appeared to take Friday’s setback in stride.

“Obviously, we’re disappointed,” said Quin Denvir, the Sacramento-based federal public defender who is heading the defense team. “It’s in the judge’s discretion and he wrote a very thoughtful opinion.”

But although Denvir said he would not dispute Debevoise’s discretion, he said he regrets that prosecutors will have two chances to find Kaczynski guilty. Under the terms of Debevoise’s ruling, the New Jersey trial would not begin until 1998 at the earliest. The judge said that the Sacramento trial is already complex and that wrapping in New Jersey charges “would further extend what promises to be an already lengthy trial.”

Mosser was killed Dec. 10, 1994, when he opened a package that had been mailed from San Francisco. It was one of several carefully crafted homemade devices mailed from California over a period of years.

The 10 bombing-related charges in California relate mainly to packages that killed computer store owner Hugh Scrutton in 1985 and timber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray in 1995. Other devices seriously injured University of California geneticist Charles Epstein and Yale University computer expert David Gelernter in 1993.

Kaczynski, who pleaded not guilty in the California case last June, entered the same plea earlier this week to Mosser’s death in Debevoise’s courtroom by means of a video teleconference arrangement. He is being held without bail in Sacramento.

Jackson reported from Washington and Gladstone from Sacramento.