The Twinkie Defense · The Amish Stud

The crime
The murders of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk by former (?) supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978 — for starters. White’s subsequent conviction on “mere” manslaughter charges and relatively light sentencing, viewed by many as a crime in their own right, touched off the White Night riots the next year.

(The trial also created the legal urban legend known as “the Twinkie defense.” I know y’all know this, but for the record, it’s not a thing. Counsel asserted that one way of gauging the normally health-conscious White’s deteriorating mental state was his consumption of junk food including Twinkies, which in turn indicated diminished capacity. Okay, back to the review.)

The story
I’d had Mike Weiss’s Double Play: The San Francisco City Hall Killings on my TBR shelf for most of the year to date; eventually it would go into inventory at Exhibit B., but with a copy in this one’s condition — toned, tilted, festooned with library stamps and lunch detritus; if it were on The Great British Booking Show, Pru would call it “rough and ready” — I felt like I could take my time processing it in order to give it a read first.