| About this series: The Tribune-Star is presenting a four-part series on the execution of Timothy McVeigh. Opinions expressed in this series reflect a consensus of the editorial board. The series is written by Dave Bennett, associate professor of journalism at Indiana State University. |
Why McVeigh must die
A day of reckoning for a just society
First in a series
Shortly after 7 a.m. on May 16, when Warden Harley Lappin announces that Timothy J. McVeigh is dead, the world will have become a little better place for the living.
Drapes will slide across the window of the execution chamber. The lifeless body of one of the nation's most cold-blooded killers will be gone from view.
On the other side of the glass, people will begin to breathe normally again -- official witnesses, 10 survivors or family members of victims of the horrible bombing, 10 journalists and six more people chosen by McVeigh himself. They will have watched grimly in tight-chested silence as their government took the life of a man that some called the American terrorist, a poster boy for the death penalty.
The impersonal events, as much as death can ever be impersonal, will have been seared into memory for replay-much like a looped tape-in unguarded moments for the rest of their own lives.
In Oklahoma City, another group will have seen the last minutes of Timothy J. McVeigh. Over special encrypted closed-circuit television, survivors of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and relatives of victims will have watched the final act of the fatal drama hundreds of miles away.
And they will have wept.
Their tears will not have been for the man who just died, but for the 168 people he murdered-husbands, wives, sons, daughters, siblings, friends.
The witnesses in the tiled viewing room at the prison, and those before television sets in Oklahoma City, will have seen an institutionalized taking of life. Every step of the process, every stage of the procedure, will have been choreographed according to a carefully planned and timed prison protocol.
They will have seen the closed curtain slowly opened to give them their first view of McVeigh strapped atop a T-shaped gurney, draped foot to neck in a clean white sheet, a single IV line inserted and ready in a vein in his arm.
They will have heard any last words the 32-year-old McVeigh chose to utter, of doubtful consolation since this man earlier had shown absolutely no remorse, even when speaking of 19 dead, broken children as "collateral damage."
They will have heard Warden Lappin read McVeigh's formal death warrant and announce, "We are ready" -- the signal to U.S. Marshal Frank Anderson to pick up the red phone linking the penitentiary with Washington, D.C., to rule out any last-minute legal stay of execution.
They will have seen Warden Lappin give the sign for executioners to send the lethal drugs coursing through the IV and into McVeigh's body-first sodium pentothal to render him unconscious, then Pavulon to relax his muscles and collapse his lungs, and finally potassium chloride to stop his heart.
Unable or unwilling to look away, they will have seen Timothy J. McVeigh die.
Such a paint-by-numbers death is, experts assure us, painless and swift. One simply drifts away. Some will say that is far too good for the decorated soldier-turned-terrorist, that he deserves to die as painfully and unexpectedly as his victims. They argue that the punishment should, ideally, fit the crime.
Perhaps they are right.
Painful or painless, McVeigh's death will not restore to life the men, women and children he killed or return to health those hundreds more he maimed.
McVeigh's death will not resurrect the sense of national safety, however unrealistic it may have been, that his two-ton fertilizer and fuel bomb exploded along with the federal building. The blast destroyed or damaged 300 structures in an area one mile square. Writ large in the sky on that mild April day in 1995 was the soot-black message all terrorists-foreign or domestic-long to send: "I am powerful and you are vulnerable."
What then will his death accomplish?
Nothing worthwhile, say critics of capital punishment. They have labeled it a state-assisted suicide for a would-be martyr. They would instead have us indefinitely sustain, in a 8-by-10-foot cell, the life of this man who chose the death of innocents as the text of his political dissatisfaction. Payback to the federal government, he said. Retribution for fiery Waco and bloody Ruby Ridge.
We see things differently. So do many of those people in Oklahoma City who survived, but lost so much.
"He can be forgiven, but he must pay restitution," Betty Robbins, who worked in the federal building, told a reporter. "And his death will be that restitution."
We know that she and McVeigh's other victims will never forget the tragedy that marred their lives, and to a lesser extent, ours. We can only hope that McVeigh's execution brings with it some solace and a sense of closure.
We believe that May 16 will be a day of reckoning for a calculating, unrepentant mass murderer whose actions demand society's supreme penalty.
We believe that's justice.
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