McVeigh keeping legal options open
By Karin Grunden and Zach Taylor
Tribune-Star
With a new execution date less than a month away, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh continues to consider his legal options, his attorneys and father said on Wednesday.
"He's unsure what he wants to do," Bill McVeigh said from his home in Pendleton, N.Y., on the day his son was originally scheduled to die by lethal injection in the U.S. Penitentiary, Terre Haute.
During a 15-minute phone conversation on Saturday, Bill McVeigh talked with his son for the first time since an April 10 visit in Terre Haute.
Asked if his son sounded frustrated by the new developments - which have included Attorney General John Ashcroft postponing the execution until June 11 - "he didn't sound frustrated to me," Bill McVeigh said.
McVeigh told his father Saturday he was waiting to see what his lawyers find in the more than 3,100 pages of evidence turned over last week by the FBI.
McVeigh, 33, is convicted of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.
On Wednesday, McVeigh's lawyers said the bomber remains in "good spirits." They declined to discuss the possibility of an appeal.
"He said initially he would consider all the possibilities and that has not changed," said attorney Robert Nigh Jr. of Tulsa, Okla., in front of the U.S. Penitentiary training center in Terre Haute.
Nigh and co-attorney Nathan Chambers of Denver spent Wednesday morning with their client. Meanwhile, a throng of journalists camped in the prison training center parking lot in hopes of garnering new information regarding McVeigh's case on the day he was originally slated to die.
On a day he originally planned to spend alone away from home, Bill McVeigh chose to golf in the morning and garden in the afternoon.
"It's a normal day," he said.
FBI director Louis Freeh spent part of the day making his first public statement about the FBI's mishap before the House Appropriations Subcommittee.
According to Freeh, 709 FBI documents totaling more than 3,100 pages discovered during an archiving process were turned over last week to Oklahoma City bombing prosecutors and McVeigh's defense attorneys. A court order had required that all evidence in the case be shared with the defense prior to the bombing trial.
Freeh confirmed that seven additional "items" discovered Friday at the FBI's Baltimore field office were turned over Tuesday to McVeigh's defense counsel.
"The FBI committed a serious error by not ensuring that every piece of information was property accounted for," the FBI director said.
Between August 1995 and November 1996, the FBI sent 11 separate communications requesting field offices send all evidence to the bombing command post in Oklahoma City, Freeh said.
However, "as we know, there were still many offices that failed to comply fully or precisely with the instructions given."
Some of the documents not originally turned over were discovered as early as March, when an FBI analyst reviewing material submitted for archiving found that some documents were not in the agency's database, Freeh said.
On March 15, the command post sent a communication to all field offices requesting another search for all Oklahoma bombing investigation-related materials, Freeh said.
After weeks of research, the FBI analysts completed their review and forwarded it to FBI Special Agent in Charge Danny Defenbaugh at the Dallas field office. He received copies of the documents May 7, Freeh said.
Freeh said a protective order prevented him from discussing specific details of the discovered materials. However, he did indicate that some of the documents center on early interviews with witnesses who claimed they had information on two suspects - known as John Doe No. 1 and 2. McVeigh has denied the existence of John Doe No. 2.
Other documents relate to early information that never produced anything of value, Freeh said.
"I have no indication that anyone intentionally withheld anything," he said, adding that "a review of these materials disclosed no new information relative to the guilt or innocence of Timothy McVeigh. The underlying investigation and his guilt remain unchallenged."
McVeigh told his father he wasn't surprised by the FBI's failure to turn over documents prior to the Oklahoma City bombing trial.
"He thinks he knew that the FBI was withholding stuff all along," and during the trial even wrote a letter to one of the prosecutors about his concern, his father said.
Chambers and Nigh are reviewing the documents. Chambers said McVeigh is taking an "active role" in the process.
"Certainly it's not an exercise in futility," Nigh said. He declined to discuss the possibility of other documents surfacing and said he believed "everything is available to us."
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