U.S. Protests Photo of Unkempt Kaczynski

Federal prosecutors Friday sought to bar Theodore Kaczynski’s attorneys from portraying the Unabomber suspect as an unkempt hermit, arguing that such a move would be a backdoor way of telling jurors he is mentally ill.

Defense lawyers have informally told the government that in their opening trial statement Monday they plan to show the jury two pictures of Kaczynski, according to prosecutors. Exactly how he looks in the photos was not disclosed.

However, prosecutors said that one picture would be from Kaczynski’s days as a UC Berkeley professor in the 1960s, when he was cleanshaven, and that the second was taken shortly after his arrest in the spring of 1996, when he was a bearded, bedraggled woodsman.

Lead prosecutor Robert Cleary asked U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell to rule on the admissibility of the photos Monday, when the trial is scheduled to begin.

In a document filed with the court, Cleary noted that earlier this week Kaczynski’s defense team abandoned plans to use expert psychiatric testimony in the trial’s first phase. If the photos are exhibited, prosecutors said, the defense will in effect be suggesting that Kaczynski is mentally ill without presenting mental health experts to back up the claim.

“Put another way,” they said, “the jury will know only, for example, that the defendant appeared disheveled at the time of his arrest and that he lived in a small cabin in a rural area. It will not have a framework [in which] to make those facts meaningful in a psychiatric or psychological sense. Such evidence can only confuse the jury.”

The filing was the latest move during a hectic prelude to the trial.

Not only did the defense this week drop plans to use mental experts in the trial’s guilt phase, but it was disclosed that Kaczynski’s attorneys had unsuccessfully sought to negotiate a plea bargain in exchange for a life sentence.

The defendant, who has pleaded not guilty, faces possible execution if convicted. Kaczynski, 55, a Harvard-educated mathematician, is charged in four bombings, including two fatal attacks in Sacramento that killed a computer store owner and a timber industry lobbyist.

In a brief telephone interview Friday, Quin Denvir, Kaczynski’s chief counsel, described the prosecution request as “kind of a last-minute, untimely motion. We don’t think it has any merit.”

Denvir also said the defense had indicated to prosecutors that it plans to present expert mental health testimony in the trial’s sentencing phase should Kaczynski be convicted. Such a move could rekindle a fight over whether the defendant will submit to examination by government psychiatrists. He has refused to allow such interviews for the trial’s first phase.