Word: hartzler
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When Joseph Hartzler, the lead prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case, made his opening statement to the jury last month, he began with a story of two little boys. Just before 8 o'clock on April 19, 1995, Tevin Garrett's mother dropped him off at the day-care center in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. "Tevin, as so often happens," Hartzler said, "cried and clung to her." A two-year-old friend of Tevin's, Elijah Coverdale, was moved to sympathy. "Elijah," Hartzler continued, "came up to Tevin and patted him on the back, and comforted...
From the moment he described the kind gesture of little Elijah Coverdale, Hartzler and his team have held the courtroom rapt, mixing sentiment with a crisp presentation of damning evidence. When he rests his case early this week, Hartzler will be able to look back on a prosecution that has performed almost without flaw. McVeigh's friend Michael Fortier, the government's key witness, testified convincingly that McVeigh planned the bombing; the witness who says he rented McVeigh the Ryder truck used in the bombing identified him without hesitation; the technical testimony has been pithy. There have also been some...
...Hartzler's skills were well displayed in his handling of Michael Fortier. All along Fortier was going to be a problematic witness. After McVeigh's arrest, he had lied repeatedly; he had bragged in telephone calls--taped by the FBI--about how he was going to make money off the case; and he was generally an unsavory character, unemployed and an admitted drug abuser. When he showed up in court, though, he looked very different from the way he did two years ago. His hair was cut; his face was clean-shaven; his ears were without earrings. He wore...
This kind of makeover of an unsympathetic witness is standard, but Fortier had been groomed in other ways. Hartzler spent 100 hours preparing him for his time on the stand. As a result, Fortier responded forthrightly to Hartzler's questions, and to Jones' too. He described how McVeigh served as best man at his wedding, held at a Las Vegas casino in July 1994. Soon afterward, Fortier said, McVeigh began to talk about taking "positive, offensive action" against the government. A plan began to take shape. By October, McVeigh and Terry Nichols had chosen a target: the federal building...
...bombing is by far the worst terrorist attack in American history, and the pressure on prosecutors to win a conviction could not be greater. According to a new TIME/CNN poll, 83% of the public believes McVeigh is guilty, so if the jury acquits him, the prosecutors, led by Joseph Hartzler, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney from Illinois, will face a tumult of outrage. Last week their burden appeared to become even heavier when the Justice Department released a damning report on the FBI forensics lab. The report specifically criticized work done in the Oklahoma bombing case, saying that investigators...