Mcveigh Faces His Fate Jury Candidates Asked If They Back Execution

Timothy McVeigh, the enigmatic Gulf War veteran accused of one of the deadliest crimes in American history, came face to face Monday with the jury candidates who will decide his fate, staring inquisitively at each as they were asked if they had the will to sentence him to death.

Wearing a casual open shirt and with his hair as close-cropped as on the day of his arrest, McVeigh betrayed little emotion on the first day of his trial on charges that he murdered 168 people by bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

As they questioned potential jurors, the judge and attorneys focused on two issues: the death penalty and the extensive pretrial publicity surrounding the case, including various reports of McVeigh allegedly having confessed to the crime.

“Even after you saw all the images of children dead and dying and adults dead and dying, and you find Timothy McVeigh guilty, could you, in good conscience, wait to hear the testimony before sentencing him to death?” Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s attorney, asked one candidate, an elderly woman.

The woman paused for several moments before answering that she could.

As McVeigh was starting the legal fight of his life inside the courtroom, the practical aftershocks of the Oklahoma City truck bombing were visible for blocks outside the Denver court.

Newly completed cement barriers rimmed the building. Officers on horseback maintained a constant surveillance. Visitors were greeted by a hound trained to sniff out explosives. A tow truck stood by ready to remove any suspicious vehicle.

Despite fears by Denver authorities that the trial would become a forum for protest groups, only one solitary protester showed up, a member of a Colorado militia group who said he thought McVeigh was being set up. He received rapt attention from the estimated 1,000 reporters.

The presiding federal judge, Richard Matsch, has vowed not to let the trial become a spectacle.

Monday, he lived up to his words, erecting a new wall between the jury and spectators, and promising to issue any rulings on whether to excuse potential jurors during private meetings with lawyers, not during open hearings.

Having ruled on a succession of motions that pretrial publicity did not make a fair trial impossible, Matsch questioned the candidates closely about what they knew of the case.

The responses of the first two were not comforting to the defense.

The first candidate, a mining engineer in his 40s, admitted to having heard about McVeigh’s alleged confession, and said his parents warned him that “McVeigh really deserves to pay for this.”

The second candidate, an elderly woman who identified herself as a church volunteer, recalled seeing McVeigh in shackles on television and musing, “Such a young man to waste his life.”

Matsch had called 1,000 Coloradans as potential jurors, but almost two-thirds of them claimed to have conflicts and begged off.

Some observers think McVeigh faces an unusual conundrum in picking a jury: Those jurors most likely to avoid the death penalty, women and men with liberal views, are unlikely to be sympathetic to his claim of being persecuted for his right-wing anti-government views.

By the same token, conservative men might identify with McVeigh’s politics, but might not hesitate to impose capital punishment.