It is – medically speaking – the opposite of the “Twinkie Defense.”
When Dan White killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, he slipped from a murder to a manslaughter conviction by claiming his brain was addled by too much sugar.
Now, the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that Steve David Garcia Jr. can try to convince a jury that too little sugar, as a result of diabetes, led him to attack his wife.
Defenses based on medical conditions are rare, said Guss Guarino, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar.
Guarino briefly worked on Garcia’s defense, saying it was “the only case I ever handled” in which such a defense was attempted.
“When I was searching for what to do with it, I wasn’t finding a lot of examples” of such defenses, Guarino said.
“Everybody kept saying, ‘oh, yeah, like the Twinkie defense,”‘ he said.
In the White case, the defense specifically cited junk food as one of the sources of the defendant’s sugar overload. The strategy became know as the “Twinkie Defense.”
Guarino said the state high court ruling doesn’t mean Garcia is automatically off the hook.
“This is an important opinion,” he said. “(It) just says you can raise this defense.”
Proving it is another matter. “It’s a medical condition that affects your ability to think. You should be able to argue that to a jury,” he said.
“This is not an escape hatch for people accused of domestic violence or assault,” Guarino said.
For the defense to work, Garcia must convince a jury that as a diabetic he suffered from low blood sugar, or hypoglycemia, so severe that it eroded his ability to reason clearly.
Last month, 60-year-old Kenneth Clark of Salida was shot and killed by police after he allegedly pointed a gun at them. Clark’s wife had called police saying that a diabetes-induced blood-sugar imbalance caused her husband to become belligerent and wave around a gun.
Too much or too little sugar can cause problems, and the more extreme the imbalance of sugar, the more severe the problems can become.
“The brain runs on sugar,” said Kristen Nadeau, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital and the University of Colorado’s Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes.
Common symptoms of low blood sugar are shakiness, increased heart rate and sweating, Nadeau said.
When blood sugar is dangerously low often, “the brain loses those warning signals, so people will go from being OK to just passing out,” said Larry Ballonoff, an endocrinologist with Kaiser Permanente.
But, Ballonoff said, “I’ve never seen somebody who did something violent that was purposeful.”
Nadeau agreed. “It’s not that typical that you’d be revved up,” she said.
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-820-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
