After working so hard to prevent a circus, Judge Richard Matsch was not about to preside over a lynching--or risk seeing the biggest case of his career reversed on appeal. So on Wednesday, with prosecutors ready to explain in grisly detail why Timothy McVeigh deserves death, Matsch ordered the jurors to lock away their feelings and remain "free from the influence of passion." He ruled that government evidence designed to stir those emotions--wedding portraits, poetry, the testimony of a boy who missed his mom--would all be inadmissible.
He might as well have tried to adjudicate a monsoon. That afternoon, Kathleen Treanor took the stand and told about kissing her four-year-old daughter Ashley goodbye and never seeing her alive again. After unspeakable days of waiting, Treanor recovered Ashley's body from the rubble, buried the little girl, and trudged on. Seven months later, someone called from the medical examiner's office. "He said, 'We have recovered a portion of Ashley's hand,'" Treanor testified in a trembling voice that rose as she fought to get through each sentence, "'and we wanted to know if you wanted that buried in the mass grave or if you would like to have it.' And I said, 'Of course, I want it. It's a part of her.'"
That was about all she could manage. Treanor dissolved, her body racked by sobs, and almost everyone in the courtroom dissolved with her. Jurors wept openly, survivors wailed, reporters groped for hankies and sodden bits of tissue. Through it all sat McVeigh, cold and silent as stone. At that moment in that room, it seemed inconceivable that the jury could do anything but sentence him to death--and that anything but simple vengeance would be the reason why. When the day's testimony was over, even Matsch looked shaken. "You're human, and I'm human too," he told the jury. "[But] we are not here to seek revenge against Timothy McVeigh."
His honor may be speaking for himself. "It's revenge for me," admits Roy Sells, a retired federal worker whose wife of 37 years was killed by McVeigh's bomb. "It's very simple. Look at what he's done. Could anyone deserve to die more?"
Those who lost something precious in the blast--their loved one, their limb, their ability to see or hear, their capacity for joy--have earned this point of view. But what about the rest of us? While the horrific scale of McVeigh's crime seems to demand the ultimate penalty, there's something unsettling about the way so much of America is gearing up for a good old-fashioned grudge killing. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, 78% of respondents--82% of men and 75% of women--wanted McVeigh to receive the death penalty. (About the same percentage favored the death penalty generally.) Yet a closer inspection of their attitudes betrays America's conflicted thinking about capital punishment. A 52% majority don't think the death penalty deters people from committing crimes, and 60% don't think vengeance is a legitimate reason to execute someone. Then what is America's honest rationale for putting this man, or any other human being, to death?