Watching Law & Order: SVU I heard one of the show’s main police officers, Detective Elliot Stabler, refer to a defendant’s proposed defence as a ”Twinkie Defence”. Intrigued by the term, I looked into it.
(Note: this post uses the Australian spelling “defence” rather than the US spelling “defense”).
That expression is now used in the US as a general term for any improbable legal defence. It originates from newspaper coverage of the 1979 trial of Dan White for the murders of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, as depicted in the film Milk.
