The timing could not have been worse – or "better" if your aim was to destroy lives. The work day had just begun, and parents had dropped the last of the children at the day care centre at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma. For 168 men, women and children inside that building the clock stopped forever at 9:03 a.m. on April 19, 1995. The bomb was inside a rented truck, and it took half the nine storey building with it. Ninety minutes later 27 year old Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran, was pulled over by the highway patrol and taken to a police station for driving a car without a licence plate. Identified later as the suspect for the bombing, he never made it out of custody. His army colleague Terry Nichols, by now wanted as well, surrendered to the police as the other suspect. A shy college dropout, McVeigh worked as an armoured car guard whilst he accumulated the guns and food that supported his survivalist philosophy. He stockpiled them, convinced that one day American society would break down and only the well prepared would survive. In 1988 he bought some rural acres that he used as a shooting range – perfect training for the army, where he enlisted in 1988 and became (predictably) a gunner. Eventually promoted from corporal to platoon leader, he was obsessed with cleaning his guns, racist literature, and defending the rights of citizens to enforce their constitutional right to bear arms. He saw action in the Gulf War, where he received a Bronze Star for heroism, and was later discharged. In 1993 he travelled to Waco, Texas, and observed the stand-off between the FBI and a survivalist cult called the Branch Davidians – it ended in a terrible fire. We don’t have Grand Juries in Australia. In America a group of citizens is called together in a criminal case to consider whether there is enough evidence to suggest that the prosecution might succeed and the person should stand trial (called an "indictment"). The equivalent in Australia is a "committal hearing" – this is in front of a magistrate, and in serious cases can take weeks. The Grand Jury in the McVeigh case agreed he should stand trial for the bombing (the indictment was for murder and "conspiracy"– that means McVeigh was alleged to be part of a plot with one or more people to organize the bombing). The Federal Attorney General authorised prosecutors to ask for the death penalty, and McVeigh’s attorney convinced the judge to move the trial to Denver because of the intense feelings in Oklahoma. They claimed the bombing was in retaliation for the Waco siege, planned in detail by McVeigh and Nichols, based on an idea they got from a novel in which a group plots to bomb a government building in Washington. The prosecution brought in witnesses close to McVeigh who testified to his growing hatred of the Federal government. They claimed McVeigh bought books on bombs, purchased the parts all over the country, and had told allies of his plans 6 months before the event. Most importantly, McVeigh was identified as the renter of the truck that contained the bomb. Interestingly, McVeigh’s fingerprints were not in the truck or on the rental agreement, and no-one could say where the bomb was constructed. But an FBI forensic expert found traces of high explosives on the clothes McVeigh was wearing when he was arrested – he was also carrying ear plugs. They challenged, apparently with good reason, the competence of the FBI forensics scientists; they also challenged the truthfulness of witnesses who had profited from the trial and had changed from their original support of McVeigh’s innocence. Also, a key prosecution witness had originally identified a different person as the driver of the truck; she only later agreed that a man resembling McVeigh may also have been there. Another employee of the car rental agency could not identify McVeigh, but McVeigh was not helped by his inability to provide an alibi (an alibi is a claim by defendants that they were at a different place when the crime was committed). They found him guilty, and later decided that he should die by lethal injection as punishment for the worst terrorist crime on American soil. Most of the evidence was circumstantial – in other words, the jury was asked to reach conclusions that can be reasonably inferred from the evidence, even though there can be no certainty about the conclusion (for instance, there was no eye witness to McVeigh’s involvement). But once found guilty, the testimony of the relatives of the victims ensured the jury would invoke the death penalty. The decision for death was unanimous, which is important in itself, because under American law anything less than a unanimous decision for execution would have meant the lesser sentence of life in prison without parole. In Australia the death penalty has been abolished and replaced by life imprisonment – in fact, America is the only Western democracy that maintains the death penalty. In America both the death sentence and the verdict can be appealed, and this can take anything up to ten years. But the verdict was popular, as polls showed that about 80% of Americans wanted McVeigh to be executed. Nowadays American executions are so common they hardly make the newspapers, but real questions are being asked about the racial makeup and backgrounds of death row inmates (overwhelmingly black or Latino and poor). Most importantly, the defence is not always (as in the McVeigh case) "gold-plated" (it cost $10m). In February 1997, the American Bar Association said "the administration of the death penalty is…a haphazard maze of unfair practices with no internal consistency". It is worth noting that in the last twenty years about 70 death row inmates have escaped execution because their convictions were overturned on appeal – that should give any person reason to tread carefully in this continuing debate, because it means that under the law they were innocent. When McVeigh was formally sentenced by the judge in August 1997, he was given the right to say something to the court. He quoted the great US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis : "Our Government is the potent and omnipresent teacher for good or ill, it teaches people by example". The US District Court Judge then ordered McVeigh executed by lethal injection. McVeigh will appeal the sentence. |