A new fight erupted yesterday over videotaping the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who said he doesn’t mind dying on camera.
In a bizarre twist just three days before McVeigh’s date with death – already postponed once after the FBI ‘fessed up to withholding stacks of pre-trial evidence – Pittsburgh federal Judge Maurice Cohill dropped a bombshell by ordering the execution by lethal injection to be videotaped as evidence in another death-row case.
The Justice Department quickly protested to a federal appeals court and succeeded in getting a temporary halt to Cohill’s order. The matter will be considered by a three-judge panel, but the dispute could end up going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Justice Department will do “everything in its power” to stop the cameras rolling.
“I don’t think an individual who kills 168 people should be in any way memorialized or aggrandized,” an outraged Ashcroft told CNN.
McVeigh lawyer Chris Tritico said he discussed the idea of videotaping with his client and the bomber said “he would not oppose the videotaping or the use of it in that [other death-penalty] case.”
Federal prosecutors were stunned when Cohill ordered the videotaping, granting a request from lawyers for an inmate awaiting execution for the pipe-bomb slaying of his ex-girlfriend and her daughter.
The lawyers claim it will show a jury that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment.
Legal experts said this latest brouhaha likely won’t stop Monday’s execution, which will be shown on closed-circuit TV to about 145 family members of the bombing victims.
If McVeigh’s killing is videotaped it wouldn’t be the first execution to be filmed. A court ordered the filming of the 1992 execution of California double-murderer Robert Harris so it could be used as evidence to shut down the state’s gas chamber.
Russell Stetler, a New York legal investigator, said he watched horrified as Harris writhed in the gas chamber for about 15 minutes. Stetler said California eventually agreed to allow death-row inmates to opt for lethal injection and his film was destroyed without ever being shown, in court or out.
Yesterday, family members of the Oklahoma City bombing victims, along with protesters and members of McVeigh’s legal team, began pouring into Terre Haute, where the execution will take place, and crowds streamed through the Oklahoma City memorial erected on the bomb site.
Kay Ice Fulton, whose brother, Paul, a federal agent, was killed in the bombing, made the trip to Terre Haute by train from Minnesota.
“I wanted time to relax,” Fulton said.
Dena Moutray, 47, who was working a block away when the bomb exploded, walked past a photograph of McVeigh in the Oklahoma City memorial museum.
“It’s time for him to go. It’s time for some peace,” Moutray said.
McVeigh, clad in prison khakis and slip-on shoes, was taken from the death-row building to a special confinement area that previously held Cuban detainees.