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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

More On Trial Than Defendant

Some wept. Some cheered. And many of us felt, more than anything else, a sense of overwhelming relief. The system still works.

Guilty, the jury concluded. After flaky verdicts and flubbed investigations in other prominent trials, there were two defendants in the trial of Timothy McVeigh. One was McVeigh. The other was the government McVeigh hated and had hoped to destroy.

He thought of government, as do others in our society, as a conspiratorial monolith. A big, shadowy thing that deploys faceless functionaries in black helicopters to take away freedom. But the real threat was in McVeigh’s mirror. Although oddball paranoids have been among us for years, the Internet and talk radio have given anti-government conspiracy ravings the credence of mass distribution. McVeigh, a compulsive loner obsessed with guns and simplistic theories about how the world works, went beyond mere raving.

In a terrible way, his crime cleared the nation’s head. The government, we saw in the aftermath, is not the cold institution imagined by the poor souls who oil guns in trailer homes in the desert and pound out Internet messages in isolated mountain cabins.

The government is us. It is a rainbow of hard-working people, discovered vividly in the bombing’s aftermath. Moms and dads, grandparents, young soldiers with high hopes, children in a day care center. The faces of the bombing victims, and their life stories, reminded us all just how much we can lose sight of when political disagreement oversimplifies and dehumanizes those with whom we disagree.

Many Americans do have valid concerns about our government. Some involve the criminal justice system. On more than one occasion it has missed the mark of justice. Lawyers and appellate courts quibble over obscure points of procedure. Jurors betray their responsibilities. Law enforcement bungles evidence gathering. O.J. Simpson got off. The cops who beat Rodney King got off in one trial and got stung in another. The Ruby Ridge shootings led to a series of fiascoes. The Spokane bombing and robbery suspects dodged their just desserts with a mistrial. The Atlanta Olympics bombing led to persecution of an innocent man.

But in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the system, messy as it is, worked. The FBI turned up an overwhelming amount of evidence. The judge ran the courtroom with an iron hand, preventing a media circus in what really was the most serious criminal case of the century. And the jury took time to do its duty.

We needed to have our faith restored.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board