(May 3) -- As he was about to be formally sentenced to life in a federal prison, Theodore Kaczynski told a Sacramento courtroom today that the government "discredited" him and distorted his actions.

He spoke from the podium in a Sacramento courtroom at the beginning of his formal sentencing by U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell.

Saying that prosecutors painted a flawed picture of him as a vengeful loner, he specifically referenced a government memo filed last week that included several new excerpts from his writings. He said he would respond to the memo at a later date.

"By discrediting me personally," he said, "they hope to discredit my political ideas."

Read the government memo

Quin Denvir, Kaczynski's attorney, had criticized the prosecution's filing last week, saying that it was unnecessary given the specifics of the plea agreement reached with Kaczynski in January. In return for pleading guilty to thirteen counts for bombings in three states, Kaczynski was given life without parole but spared a death sentence. Burrell sentenced him today to four consecutive life sentences, in accordance with the agreement.

Kaczynski "committed unspeakable and monstrous crimes," said Burrell, "for which he shows utterly no remorse."

In court today, Kaczynski said prosecutors made "false statements, misleading statements" about him.

"I ask that people reserve their judgment about me," he told a courtroom audience that included the families of victims Thomas Mosser and California logging executive Gilbert Murray.

Susan Mosser, the wife of the advertising executive Kaczynski killed with a package bomb in 1994, spoke about the contents of the bomb that killed her husband -- razor blades and nails. She told how their young daughter reacted upon seeing her father bleeding to death.

Mosser was one of several victims to speak at the hearing. Geneticist Charles Epstein, who was injured in a 1993 bomb sent by Kaczynski to Epstein's Tiburon, California home, told Kaczynski, "You did everything, and more, and you did it in cold blood."

David Kaczynski, who first suggested to authorities that his brother might have been the Unabomber, praised the victims for their "remarkable courage."

The victims made clear to Kaczynski: They saw him as an amoral killer without remorse, and they returned the sentiment in kind.

"Make this sentence bulletproof, bombproof -- if you will," Susan Mosser told the judge. "Lock him so far down that when he dies, he will be closer to hell."