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McVeigh is a slender reed on which to hang so much human grief and loathing. His opacity--the blank look punctuated by occasional bursts of defense-table bonhomie--is especially revolting to those who sense that he fancies himself a prisoner of war on trial for collateral damage that he sees as the inevitable consequence of combat. That makes people want to see him dead, but it may be the best reason not to execute him--to deny him his bid for martyrdom, to keep him earthbound and watch him slowly wither, not a hero to his cause but just another old jailbird shuffling around his cell.
As the new poster boy for capital punishment--perhaps the most effective since Ted Bundy--McVeigh is causing so much discussion that "it's as if we have not had a death penalty until now," says Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, a nonprofit organization that represents capital defendants. Foes of the death penalty find this troubling, since McVeigh's case is so unusual, but they should be grateful to him for reopening a debate that was essentially over in America. Three-quarters of the public--along with the Congress, the President and the courts--is solidly in favor of capital punishment. In many states, executions--there have been 34 of them since the beginning of 1996--have become workaday affairs, so routine they barely make the papers or draw protesters to the prisons.
By stirring up debate, McVeigh gives the abolitionists another chance to make their case by reminding people how little he has in common with the vast majority of death-row inmates. Where McVeigh is an unrepentant, white mass murderer who planned carefully, killed wantonly, worked to cover his tracks and enjoyed a competent, $10 million defense, most death-row inmates are poor people, disproportionately black or Latino, often retarded or abused as children, and are represented by court-appointed greenhorns and burnouts better suited to traffic court--or, in their appeal stage, by no one at all. And where the case against McVeigh seems gold-plated, other defendants are sentenced to death on the basis of flimsy evidence, jury whim, prosecutorial misconduct or the luck of the draw. Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, says that in three capital cases in Houston recently defense lawyers were observed to be sleeping during the trial. All three convictions were upheld on appeal, and one of the defendants has been executed.
McVeigh's case is just so clean. "The danger is [when] somebody says, 'If ever there was a case for the death penalty, this is the case,'" says Bright. "The problem is that we never limit it to that case. We have more than 3,000 people on death row, many without lawyers, and the overwhelming majority are not the Timothy McVeighs or Ted Bundys or John Wayne Gacys." Simply put, the most powerful argument against the death penalty is that it is dispensed by a justice system that favors some defendants over others. In February, the American Bar Association called for a moratorium on executions because "the administration of the death penalty, far from being fair and consistent, is instead a haphazard maze of unfair practices with no internal consistency."