The McVeigh case and the triumph of victims’ rights.
View this article at The Weekly Standard
OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to die by lethal injection May 16 in a federal prison in Indiana, the first person to be executed under the federal death penalty law. Another first: Families of McVeigh’s victims and survivors of the attack received an invitation from federal authorities led by Attorney General John Ashcroft to watch a live closed-circuit broadcast of the execution. As of the May 1 deadline, some 285 (of about 3,000 eligible) had indicated they would turn out.
Everything about the Oklahoma City bombing resists efforts to put matters into context: the spectacular quality of the crime, its unique devastation as an exercise in mass murder, its utterly unrepentant perpetrator, and his grotesque ideological motivation. For an illustration of the exceptionalism, note that 22 percent of Americans in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll both believe that McVeigh should be executed and oppose the death penalty. Some death penalty opponents have insisted that McVeigh’s is exactly the sort of hard case that requires opponents to stiffen their resolve against capital punishment. On the other hand, there is nothing obviously irrational about opposing capital punishment in general while allowing for an exception in the case of someone who murdered 168 of your countrymen.
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Tod Lindberg 