Word: mcveigh
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When Timothy McVeigh dies at a prison in Terre Haute, Ind., on May 16, only a few hundred people will watch him take his last breath. Millions more, however, will be waiting to hear the details of his final moments. Did he show any remorse? What were his last words? Many of us will harbor a more gruesome curiosity: What was it like to watch someone...
...McVeigh's pending execution, and Attorney General John Ashcroft's guidelines for its limited broadcast (only via closed-circuit signal to victims and survivors in Oklahoma City) have raised a plethora of questions entwining freedom of the press and the cold hard facts of capital punishment. None are readily answered...
...Whose rights are we protecting when we bar the broadcast of an execution? And how do we justify hiding the execution itself even as we loudly proclaim its efficacy as a deterrent to crime? Would a free broadcast of McVeigh's death serve a positive purpose by blunting our fascination with death - or would it just provoke further violence...
...court-ordered release last year of a videotape of death chamber preparations in Tennessee for Robert Glen Coe right up to the lethal injection, and with clips from the 1999 electrocution in Florida of Allen Lee Davis available on the Internet, executions are beginning to sneak into public view. McVeigh himself wants to go all the way. In a letter sent this month from his 10-foot-by-12-foot cell to the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman, he wrote, "It has been said that all of Oklahoma was a victim of the bombing. Can all of Oklahoma watch?" Federal prison...
...Many of McVeigh's victims have voiced opposition to making his death public, even if they plan to watch it themselves. "It's a certifiable example, the epitome of a narcissist, to believe the American people would be interested in his execution like he's this great hero," says Paul Heath, a Veterans Affairs psychologist who was working on the fifth floor of the building McVeigh destroyed with a truck bomb. He, and others like him, insist that executions should remain a private matter between the killers and the relatives - not public spectacles...