Word: mcveighs
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...McVeigh is a slender reed on which to hang so much human grief and loathing. His opacity--the blank look punctuated by occasional bursts of defense-table bonhomie--is especially revolting to those who sense that he fancies himself a prisoner of war on trial for collateral damage that he sees as the inevitable consequence of combat. That makes people want to see him dead, but it may be the best reason not to execute him--to deny him his bid for martyrdom, to keep him earthbound and watch him slowly wither, not a hero to his cause but just...
...poster boy for capital punishment--perhaps the most effective since Ted Bundy--McVeigh is causing so much discussion that "it's as if we have not had a death penalty until now," says Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, a nonprofit organization that represents capital defendants. Foes of the death penalty find this troubling, since McVeigh's case is so unusual, but they should be grateful to him for reopening a debate that was essentially over in America. Three-quarters of the public--along with the Congress, the President and the courts--is solidly in favor...
...stirring up debate, McVeigh gives the abolitionists another chance to make their case by reminding people how little he has in common with the vast majority of death-row inmates. Where McVeigh is an unrepentant, white mass murderer who planned carefully, killed wantonly, worked to cover his tracks and enjoyed a competent, $10 million defense, most death-row inmates are poor people, disproportionately black or Latino, often retarded or abused as children, and are represented by court-appointed greenhorns and burnouts better suited to traffic court--or, in their appeal stage, by no one at all. And where the case...
...McVeigh's case is just so clean. "The danger is [when] somebody says, 'If ever there was a case for the death penalty, this is the case,'" says Bright. "The problem is that we never limit it to that case. We have more than 3,000 people on death row, many without lawyers, and the overwhelming majority are not the Timothy McVeighs or Ted Bundys or John Wayne Gacys." Simply put, the most powerful argument against the death penalty is that it is dispensed by a justice system that favors some defendants over others. In February, the American Bar Association...
...McVeigh's case gives the country a chance to confront more clearly the issue of why America, alone among Western democracies, puts people to death. Is capital punishment meant to benefit society or provide comfort to the victimized? On the question of whether capital punishment deters crime, McVeigh doesn't shed much light; there's no deterrence value in executing a zealot (true believers, after all, want to die for the cause). But deterrence is always murky; there's no proof capital punishment discourages crime by anyone other than the criminals who get executed. Death-penalty proponent Glenn Lammi, chief...