McVeigh execution delayed

Timothy McVeigh was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday May 16, at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. His lethal injection has now been re-scheduled to June 11th. He was convicted of bombing the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995, causing the deaths of 168 people. His death would be the first federal execution since 1963. “The new material isn´t likely to cast Mr. McVeigh´s conviction in a different light. But if this type of error could happen even in this case, which has been under the closest of public scrutiny since the moment the bomb went off, think what must happen in countless cases -- particularly at the state level -- in which nobody is watching carefully” said in response a Washington Post editorial. “His execution would end what has been a de facto moratorium on capital punishment at federal level for 38 years. That’s very serious,” Hands off Cain Secretary Sergio D’Elia said. McVeigh took sole responsibility for the worst act of terrorism on American soil ever in a recently published book called “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing”. McVeigh, who co-operated with the book project, for the first time acknowledged blowing up the Murrah Building to avenge the 1992 government siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during which an FBI sniper killed the wife and son of separatist Randy Weaver, and the 1993 federal raid on the Branch Davidian religious sect near Waco, Texas, in which about 80 people were killed, including 22 children. A decorated Gulf War veteran, McVeigh expressed no remorse for the bombing, and caused outrage when he called the children who died in the bombing “collateral damage” even though he insisted that he did not know that the building housed a day-care centre. He did not take the stand in his own defence during the trial, but told the book’s authors that “My decision to take human life at the Murrah building – I did not do it for personal gain... I did it for the larger good.”John R. Smith, a court-appointed psychiatrist who evaluated McVeigh for 25 hours in 1995, concluded that his patient was deeply depressed and singularly focused, but not insane. An FBI archivist discovered the 3,000 withheld documents as all the materials related to the case were being compiled, CNN said. The U.S. attorney in Denver informed his defence team and the federal court in Denver of what the FBI called an oversight. It had only just discovered that investigatory documents, including reports on FBI interviews, photographs, letters and tapes, were withheld from McVeigh’s defence. The admission has raised the conspiracy theory again. Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s main attorney when his trial started but later fired, contended than McVeigh was part of a larger conspiracy, and that he was taking sole responsibility to protect others. McVeigh recently sparked more controversy when he declared himself in favour of his execution being webcast live. Leading abolitionist Sister Helen Prejean, of ‘Dead Man Walking’ fame, also came out in favour of his execution being broadcast. She called him the “symbol of the death penalty” and said “taking revenge executing him will only have negative effects.”Media reports in various European and American papers also expressed themselves in favour of broadcasting the execution to show up the reality of the death penalty. However the execution will only be shown to about 300 people - either family members of the 168 people killed in the April 19, 1995 bombing or those who were injured - who confirmed to the Justice Department they wanted to see the closed-circuit telecast from Terra Haute, Indiana. These are just a small fraction of the 2,300 listed by the U.S. attorney´s office as victims and survivors.Not all the families of the victims are united in believing that McVeigh should be killed. Bud Welch, whose daughter Julie Marie, 23, was killed in the bombing says “the execution of Timothy McVeigh will not bring Julie back or her colleagues, nor will it end the grieving for any one of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. Revenge and hate are the reasons the 168 people died that day in 1995. I oppose the death penalty absolutely, in all cases, because in all cases it is an act of revenge and hatred.”