Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
"If the government can't get it right in this case, how can we rely on it to get it right in any case?" Experts react to the FBI blunder.
May 12, 2001 | In a dramatic last-minute turnaround, the Justice Department announced Friday it would postpone the execution of Timothy McVeigh. After confirming the existence of approximately 3,100 pages of previously undisclosed FBI evidence, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the department would give McVeigh's defense team time to review the material and take whatever action it deemed appropriate. Ashcroft said the Justice Department does not believe the new evidence will raise any doubt about McVeigh's guilt.
The scheduled execution of McVeigh, who was convicted of killing 168 in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, has now been postponed to June 11, when he will be executed by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. But McVeigh's lawyer, Rob Nigh, said that his client was frustrated by the events and might reconsider his earlier decision not to challenge the execution order. Meanwhile, families of those killed in the bombing expressed anguish at the delay.
At a press conference Friday, President George W. Bush told reporters that the Justice Department's decision to issue a stay is proof that the criminal justice system is working properly. "Today is an example of the system being fair," Bush said. "This is a country that will bend over backwards to make sure that his constitutional rights are guaranteed as opposed to rushing his fate." But opponents of the death penalty believe the case is a gross example of how human error can taint a capital prosecution -- even one as high-profile as McVeigh's.
Beyond the death penalty debate, the sudden revelation of a mountain of evidence that was not made available to defense attorneys before the trial -- including photos and tapes collected from some 45 FBI field offices -- raises serious questions about the management of an already embattled federal agency. Security lapses, the bombshell Robert Hanssen spy case and the planned departure of chief G-man Louis Freeh have rocked the FBI in recent months. Reporters at Bush's press conference asked whether Freeh, who announced his resignation last week, knew about the documents. Bush said Freeh did not discuss it when they met, and that he had only learned of the documents this week. For now, these questions linger, but Ashcroft has pledged to conduct "a careful study" into what went wrong.
Salon gathered reactions from criminal justice experts about the latest developments.
Rob Warden is director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law.
If the government can't get it right in this case, how can we rely on the government to get it right in any case? Regardless of whether this new evidence is relevant to the issue of guilt or innocence in the Timothy McVeigh case, I think it shows clearly that there are problems in the criminal justice system. We cannot rely on this system, particularly when it comes to taking the lives of our citizens. We can simply never rely on the fact that all of the evidence has been brought forward. I think that's the bottom line.
The statements of the attorney general and the president today are incredibly disingenuous. They suggest that we'll do everything, we'll go to the greatest lengths to make sure that we don't execute innocent people. But, in fact, George W. Bush has signed off on a number of executions in which the evidence was incredibly dubious.
Bush allowed the execution in June 2000 of Gary Graham to go forward, based on a single eyewitness identification when there were other eyewitnesses who the jury never heard, who were in a better position to see the culprit and who said unequivocally that it was not Graham. In the previous federal administration, we had a number of cases in which foreign nationals have been executed when their rights under the Vienna Convention had been violated. We've had capital cases in which people have been executed and the Justice Department, over which Ashcroft now presides, has taken the opposite position. In fact, we have gone to great lengths to execute people regardless of the evidence that they may have been innocent.
They stopped this execution simply because this is a really high-profile case, when in fact every judgment of our justice system is not reliable. Whatever reforms we need to fix this may be beside the point in the current debate [over McVeigh], but we certainly should never kill our citizens based on the evidence produced by this unreliable system.
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