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Celebrity murder trials inevitably attract massive media coverage. What made the Dan White case unique was the volatile mix of politics, revenge, and homosexual intolerance. Many wondered if that intolerance spilled over into the jury room. On 27 November 1978, 32-year-old Dan White entered the San Francisco City Hall by crawling in through a basement window. He adopted this unorthodox means of ac…
Prosecutor Thomas Norman sought to diffuse some of that volatility with a calm, orderly representation of the facts when the state opened its case against Dan White on 1 May 1979. He described in simple terms what amounted to a double execution, carried out deliberately and with malice aforethought. It was, he said, a crime deserving of death in the gas chamber. Few could have envied Douglas Schmi…
Schmidt capitalized on what had been a lackluster prosecution by turning the trial into an examination of White's mental state. Several psychiatrists testified that the defendant had not really meant to commit murder but had been driven to it by factors beyond his control. Much was made of White's prodigious intake of junk food and candy--what came to be known as the "Twinkies Defense"--in which a…
"The Blame Game" is played by many criminal defendants, and many legal observers believe that the game has spun out of control. Defendants have a right to present arguments in their defense, but some claim that the right is being abused to the detriment of justice. The first great example of the Blame Game was the Twinkie Defense asserted by manslaughter defendant Daniel White in 1979. What follow…
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