Reuters april 5
Saturday April 7 10:00 AM ET
Detailed Plans for ‘Efficient’ McVeigh Execution
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. prison officials have drawn up meticulous plans for executing Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (news – web sites) detailing everything from the time of his last meal, the clothes he will wear and plans to counter a possible assault on the jail by sympathizers or angry victims.
A 54-page protocol document prepared by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and published by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, sets out minute-by-minute instructions for staff at the Terre Haute, Ind., federal prison where McVeigh will be put to death by lethal injection on May 16 for the April 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people.
The exact timing of the execution has yet to be set.
According to the document, prison officials want to ensure that the man convicted of the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil meets his end “in an efficient and humane manner” and in a way “that minimizes the negative impact on the safety, security and operational integrity” of the prison.
Hundreds of journalists, protesters and anti-government activists are expected to gather outside the prison for the execution. McVeigh enraged victims last week when he admitted in a new book that he pulled off the bombing and viewed the 19 children killed in the attack as “collateral damage.”
The document reflects concern over a series of possible disturbances on or near the execution date, ranging from rescue attempts by anti-government sympathizers to a sudden act of vengeance by any of the victims or disturbances by other prison inmates.
McVeigh, 32, has said he carried out the bombing in revenge for the FBI (news – web sites)’s bloody showdown with the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, two years to the day before the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City blast.
Contingency plans include the creation of a command center at the prison, special law enforcement teams, and joint training exercises to beef up security.
Phone lines and communication systems will be tested in the event of any last-minute appeals or interventions, although this is considered unlikely since McVeigh last year requested that all appeals be dropped.
McVeigh will be dressed in khaki pants, shirt and slip-on shoes 30 minutes before the execution and escorted — or shackled and carried if he resists — from a holding cell to the execution room.
The document instructs prison staff to “prevent emotion or intimidation” from hindering them in their duties.
Some 30 witnesses — six of them chosen by McVeigh, some media representatives and a number of victims — will watch through the windows of an adjoining room as McVeigh, strapped onto a gurney, is asked whether he wishes to make a last statement. Officials have already advised him that any statement should be kept “reasonably brief”.
He will then be injected with a lethal mixture of sodium pentothal, pavulon and potassium chloride. Death is expected to be swift
April 13, 2001
Witnesses to an Execution
itnesses to an Execution
In a press conference yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the execution of Timothy McVeigh on May 16 in Terre Haute, Ind., would be televised via a live, encrypted, closed- circuit telecast. It will be shown in an unnamed facility in Oklahoma City for families of the victims who were killed in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. The telecast will not be recorded. Instead it will be, as Mr. Ashcroft put it, “instantaneous and contemporaneous,” leaving no permanent record for others to view.
This is a warrantable solution to a basic logistical problem — the sheer number of direct victims of Mr. McVeigh’s crime. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which allows the families of victims to witness an execution, has increased the number of such witnesses allowed at the prison in Terre Haute to 10. But it was impractical to accommodate on-site all interested relatives of the 168 people who died in Oklahoma City, and many of them would be hard pressed to make the journey to another state in any case. Thus Mr. Ashcroft made the sensible decision to allow the execution to be transmitted on closed- circuit television to this group.
There is no telling what emotions the survivors and victims’ families will feel when they watch that telecast. There is no knowing whether seeing Mr. McVeigh’s death will satisfy those who want revenge or bring closure to those who are seeking it. That is for them to understand as best they can.
Mr. Ashcroft was surely right to bar televising the execution for the general public. Under most circumstances, we believe such decisions belong in the hands of the news media, not the government. In this situation, however, the very act of permitting television cameras for general public broadcast would make a cruel and unusual spectacle of the legally mandated sentence. Such broadcasts would be different in kind from those parts of the legal process — including court trials — that should be regularly televised. Mr. McVeigh has said he would like his execution to be broadcast, but it is the standards of a civilized society that should govern, not his opinion.
This page opposes the death penalty for many reasons, most of which need no rehearsal here. But by publicly televising Mr. McVeigh’s execution, broadcasters would be showing the very kind of act — the taking of a human life — for which Mr. McVeigh is being executed. The telecast would appeal to the basest instincts of the viewing public, and would inevitably coarsen our society.
The government stopped conducting public executions in the early 20th century for much the same reason that it will use lethal injections rather than more brutal technologies to kill Timothy McVeigh — to reinforce the distinction between a lynching and a soberly considered act of duly authorized justice. The last federal execution occurred in 1963, and the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972. But now, under a subsequently enacted death penalty statute, we are drifting backward and resuming federal executions by putting to death Mr. McVeigh. It is essential to drift backward no further by making the execution a public spectacle.