Word: mcveighs
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...McVeigh's latest battle with the Federal Government is, for him at least, a win-win proposition. Last week lawyers for the Oklahoma City bomber asked federal judge Richard P. Matsch to stay McVeigh's execution, which was postponed from May 16 until June 11 after the FBI admitted it had misplaced more than 4,000 pages of documents that should have been given to McVeigh's defense team. Arguing that the government had perpetrated "a fraud on the court," the lawyers requested a hearing to determine whether the feds willfully withheld the documents in order to conceal exculpatory evidence...
...summarizes a call received by the FBI from Morris John Kuper Jr., who told investigators to check out activities in a parking lot a block away from the Murrah Federal Building about an hour before it was blown apart. Kuper later testified that he had seen a man resembling McVeigh walking with a dark-haired, muscular companion--a description that matches those by other witnesses of a man who came to be known as John Doe 2. Investigators eventually concluded the mystery accomplice didn't exist and tried to disprove some of the reported sightings. Kuper, for instance, was discredited...
...there was another confederate in addition to convicted accomplices Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, that could have affected McVeigh's sentencing, if not his trial--especially if the mystery man was more than a bit player. McVeigh lawyer Richard Burr contended last week that the testimony of a witness who claimed to have seen a Ryder truck and other vehicles, including one containing fertilizer, like the one used for the bomb, at Geary Lake in Kansas the day before the bombing helped save Nichols from the death penalty, because jurors couldn't be certain that someone else wasn't involved...
...minds, like an image in stencil, drawn sharply for us by its absence amidst all the matter surrounding it, all the more portentious for the danger signs we have hung on its perimeter. For most of us outside Oklahoma City, the terror of April 19, 1995 has faded; McVeigh himself, with his angry-white-male vehemence, already seems a man out of time. His case may be too singular to spur real death-penalty debate. But if this makes us tune out the pregame, it may make the moment itself more jarring. It is still a rare and godlike thing...
...there may be something more to this case. McVeigh's is the first federal execution in 37 years. It is the killing of a terrorist, who therefore by definition attacked us. So on Monday it will not be Jack Kevorkian or Jack Ruby or even the citizens of another state sticking in the needle. It will be us. Is it outlandish to think that a country that doesn't like to see veins in its fried chicken doesn't much want to think about that...