Word: guilts
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...life," he says. Lately he has been thinking about the days just after the accident, when he sat with his wife in the intensive care unit of Taichung Veterans General Hospital. In the hot, stuffy ward with its pale yellow curtains and beige walls, he was overwhelmed by his guilt at what had happened to her. If he had never gone into politics and had stayed a corporate lawyer, he and his wife could have avoided this tragedy. "You must hate me," he said...
Then the FBI revealed that it had suddenly found 3,135 documents about the Oklahoma City bombing investigation that McVeigh's defense lawyers had never seen, and Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped the clock. The problem was not that there were doubts about McVeigh's guilt; he has admitted that. This was not the discovery of some sinister plot, Justice officials insisted--just human error, maybe a computer glitch. But it was another bomb exploding nonetheless. Ashcroft looked drained and solemn as he announced that McVeigh's execution would be postponed for a month so his defense lawyers could review...
That same week, prosecutors in Alabama finally convicted the Klansman who bombed the black church in Birmingham back in 1963, killing four little girls. We could have done this years ago, they said, if the FBI had just handed over their secret tapes that proved his guilt. That conviction came after months of criticism that the FBI had dismissed warnings of a mole in its ranks right up until they tripped over Russian spy Robert Hanssen, an agent for 25 years. Last month the bureau announced a mediation agreement with African-American agents in a long-running class action charging...
...opponents seized on the FBI's embarrassing revelation to argue that when the stakes are this high, justice must be perfect. The moment Ashcroft announced the delay, questions flew. What if these documents had turned up six days after his execution, rather than six days before? McVeigh admitted his guilt, but death row is full of inmates who have not. How much doubt can the criminal justice system withstand? "The events of the past three days demonstrate that even in Mr. McVeigh's case, the government is not capable of carrying out the death penalty in a fair and just...
According to the Congressional testimony yesterday of FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, nothing in the newly discovered documents is material to the question of McVeigh’s guilt. But such near-mistakes are anything but rare in the American legal system. In 1981, Clifford Henry Bowen was sentenced to death in Oklahoma despite 12 alibi witnesses after prosecutors failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. Similar stories could be told for 16 other Americans in the last 25 years, all of whom were convicted after exculpatory evidence was withheld from the defense, either in error or intentionally. In a sense...