lavender needs to get her butt back in gear. (Aren't you glad I didn't say "& Co.")?

[Never]

lavender needs to get her butt back in gear. (Aren't you glad I didn't say "& Co.")?

Don't you have something political to say?
Anything?

I'll even argue with you. Not that I know anything about anything but I need a 'serious' thread to troll.. I mean, make light hearted comments in.

 

[lavender]

 

[Siren]

Ah the twinkie defense

 

[Laurel]

Lavy's a Twinkie! Lavy's a Twinkie!

If we can't have political debate, at least we can indulge in childish name calling.

 

[Never]

Er, someone killed someone and said it wasn't their fault because they had just ate a Twinkie.

Or was it, they needed to eat a Twinkie and get their blood sugar up?

 

[Siren]

Close Neverland very close

 

[Never]

That does it.

 

[Weevil]

A group of kids said that a lifetime of eating high in sugar junkfood got their blood sugar to a level where they couldn't control themselves.


And I didn't even go to Lawyering School.

 

[Never]

On 27 November 1978, Dan [Best Defense] White, a former San Francisco city supervisor who had recently resigned his position, entered San Francisco's city hall by climbing through a basement window and then shot and killed both mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. After White's subsequent trial for the murders, a new term entered the American lexicon: "Twinkie defense." This phrase came to represent the efforts of criminals to avoid responsibility for their actions by claiming that some external force beyond their control had caused them to act the way they had, and it arose from the successful defense mounted by White's legal team that White's eating of Twinkies and other sugar-laden junk foods had diminished his mental capacity.

"Twinkie defense" is now a widespread and commonly-recognized term. It is also a term based on something that never happened.

Neither White nor his defense team ever claimed that White's consumption of junk food had wrought psychological or physiological changes in White that caused him to act in way inconsistent with his "normal" behavior when he shot George Moscone and Harvey Milk. White's defense was that he had been suffering from a long-standing and untreated depression that diminished his capacity to distinguish right from wrong, and thus he was not capable of the premeditation required to support a charge of first degree murder. Dr. Martin Blinder was called as a witness by the defense to testify that the conversion of the previously health-conscious White to a diet of Twinkies and other junk foods was evidence of his [Best Defense] depression. This testimony was similar to offering evidence that the habitual wearing of torn and dirty clothes by someone who had previously always been a snappy dresser was a sign that that person was suffering from depression. Nobody who paid attention would claim that such testimony asserted that bad clothing had caused the defendant's depression, but that is essentially what happened in White's case. Junk food was used as evidence that White was depressed; White's depression was used to establish grounds for a successful diminished capacity plea; and therefore White was judged incapable of the premeditation required for a murder conviction.

When the diminished capacity defense was successful and White was convicted of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, an outraged media and public skipped the middlemen. White's depression wasn't mentioned; instead we were told he had claimed that "Twinkies made him do it." (Dr. Blinder did suggest excessive sugar could have aggravated a chemical imbalance in White's brain, but that comment was offered only as a parenthetical remark during Blinder's testimony about White's depression. It was not in any way a substantive part of White's defense

 

[Mischka]

...and two years after he was paroled, he committed suicide by inhaling exhaust fumes.

Darn it! If only I had seen this thread earlier, I could have beaten Never to the punch.

 

[Siren]

OMG Never I am wet from your posting

 

[Dillinger]

Maybe I'm just becoming a twinkie. I mean, look at my avatar.

Does that mean you have a creamy filling?