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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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USA | Timothy McVeigh had ice cream and gazed at the moon just before execution in Terre Haute

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"McVeigh meets fate," the front page of the Indianapolis Star read on June 11, 2001.

Timothy McVeigh, convicted in the Oklahoma City Bombing, was executed by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute 20 years ago on this day.

He "wrote letters, ate (mint chocolate chip) ice cream and was in 'good spirits' before the scheduled execution," the newspaper reported.

The execution itself, the first federal death penalty in the U.S. since 1963, also spurred strong emotions and debates around the country. Another Indianapolis Star front page story called the legal case a "collision of good and evil," "right and wrong" and "all or nothing" for many people.

Terre Haute was consumed by the controversy. Nearly 100 protesters marched to the prison to oppose the execution. East of the penitentiary, where the execution took place, a field became known as "Camp McVeigh" for the media tents and satellite trucks to cover the execution.

Some spent time praying for the Oklahoma City bombing victims and their families — and McVeigh himself. One priest said he believed the convicted bomber would go to heaven, saying he didn't deserve to be demonized. Another said he was "on his way to hell" because of his unrepentance. 

More than 300 bombing survivors and relatives of victims watched a closed-circuit telecast of the execution at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.

"I need to see it to get the reality," said Rudy Guzman, who lost his older brother in the bombing.

The execution was scheduled for 7 a.m., with McVeigh dressed in a shirt, khaki pants and slip-on shoes. He was strapped to a gurney before being taken to the death chamber, where he received two IV injections of a lethal cocktail of chemicals. McVeigh was permitted to make a "reasonably brief" statement, but he declined. 

Instead, McVeigh left a final message through a hand-copied poem, with his signature at the bottom. “Invictus” by William Ernst Henley ends with the following lines:

“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

Death chamber, USP Terre Haute
IndyStar’s Diana Penner, one of 10 media members who watched the execution, wrote in an eyewitness account for the newspaper the next day: “Ultimately, however, McVeigh was stripped of the most fundamental control: The judicial system and society decided he would die and there was nothing he could do about it.”

A lawyer for McVeigh, Robert Nigh, spoke of one of his client's final moments, looking up into the nighttime sky for the first — and last time — in years.

"He was able to look up in the sky... and see the moon directly," Nigh said. "And that was valuable to him."

McVeigh, a former U.S. Army soldier, was convicted of 11 counts of murder, conspiracy and using a weapon of mass destruction after detonating a fertilizer bomb in front of a downtown Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. 

The attack killed 168 people, including 19 children, making it the most deadly domestic assault in U.S. history.

He was tried and found guilty by a jury in Denver in June 1997.

Source: indystar.com, R. Jaipuriar, June 11, 2021


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Terre Haute, IN, USA
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