Kaczynski Asks Court to Grant Him a Trial

Convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski says he was coerced into pleading guilty to three murders and wants a federal appeals court to allow a trial, which could end in a death sentence.

The guilty pleas “were induced by the threat of a mental-state defense that Kaczynski would have found unendurable, as well as by deprivation of constitutional rights,” such as the right to control his own defense and represent himself, he wrote in a brief filed Dec. 28, referring to himself in the third person.

The 58-page, handwritten brief, composed in a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado, asks the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to allow Kaczynski to withdraw his guilty pleas and go to trial.

As an alternative, he requested a new U.S. District Court hearing, before a different judge, on whether his rights were violated when his lawyers insisted on using a defense based on his mental condition.

Kaczynski, a mathematician who became a recluse in Montana, pleaded guilty in January 1998 to mail bombings that killed three people and injured 23. Two deaths occurred in Sacramento and the third was in New Jersey.

The appeals court allowed Kaczynski to reopen the case in October.