USA | Timothy McVeigh had ice cream and gazed at the moon just before execution in Terre Haute

"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.”

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

🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

Louisiana | Execution by nitrogen gas ‘ugly way to die’: MD

What is it like to be executed by nitrogen gas? Dr. Jonathan Groner, a medical ethicist who studies capital punishment, has not witnessed an execution using this method, but he speculates about what happens to an inmate who is given pure nitrogen to inhale through a mask. “They don’t go quietly, I will say that,” Groner, a professor of surgery at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, told “Banfield” on Wednesday. A federal judge this week halted the state of Louisiana’s plans to execute an inmate for the first time through “nitrogen hypoxia.” State officials plan to appeal the judge’s decision, which raised questions about whether using nitrogen gas is a cruel and unusual punishment.

America’s next killing spree: 10 days, five states, six death-row prisoners set to die

Desolate spectacle of executions begins again under Trump, in landscape of capital punishment as riven as US is as a whole David Leonard Wood. Jessie Hoffman. Aaron Gunches. Wendell Grissom. Edward Thomas James. Moises Sandoval Mendoza. So many names. So many dead men walking. Ten days, five states, six death row prisoners scheduled for execution. For a decade now, capital punishment in the US has been on the wane. Last year, for the 10th year running, there were fewer than 30 executions in America, and the number of new death sentences is also tracking at historic lows.

Violent and sudden. What a firing squad execution looked like through my eyes

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — I’ve now watched through glass and bars as 11 men were put to death at a South Carolina prison. None of the previous 10 prepared me for watching the firing squad death of Brad Sigmon on Friday night. I might now be unique among U.S. reporters: I’ve witnessed three different methods — nine lethal injections and an electric chair execution. I can still hear the thunk of the breaker falling 21 years later. As a journalist you want to ready yourself for an assignment. You research a case. You read about the subject.

Texas | Court stays execution of Texas man days before he was set to die by lethal injection

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court on Tuesday halted the execution of a man who has spent more than 30 years on death row and had been set to die by lethal injection this week over the killings of six girls and young women found buried in the desert near El Paso. It was the second scheduled execution in the U.S. halted on Tuesday after a federal judge stopped Louisiana’s first death row execution using nitrogen gas, which was to take place next week. In Texas, the order was another reprieve for David Leonard Wood, who in 2009 was about 24 hours away from execution when it was halted over claims he is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution.

South Carolina plans to carry out a firing squad execution. Is it safe for witnesses?

South Carolina plans to execute a man by firing squad on March 7, the first such execution in the state and the first in the nation in 15 years. But firearms experts are questioning whether South Carolina's indoor execution setup is safe for the workers who will shoot the prisoner and the people who will watch. Photos released by the South Carolina Department of Corrections show that the state intends to strap the prisoner, Brad Sigmon, to a metal seat in the same small, indoor brick death chamber where South Carolina has executed more than 40 other prisoners by electric chair and lethal injection since 1985.

South Carolina Executes Brad Sigmond

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat was executed by firing squad Friday, the first U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by that method, which he saw as preferable to the electric chair or lethal injection. Three volunteer prison employees used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. Sigmon killed David and Gladys Larke in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.

Texas Death Row chef who cook for hundreds of inmates explained why he refused to serve one last meal

Brian Price would earn the title after 11 years cooking for the condemned In the unlikely scenario that you ever find yourself on Death Row, approaching your final days as a condemned man, what would you request for your final meal? Would you push the boat out and request a full steal dinner or play it safe and opt for a classic dish such as pizza or a burger? For most of us it's something that we'll never have to think about, but for one man who spent over a decade working as a 'Death Row chef' encountering prisoner's final requests wasn't anything out of the ordinary.

Indonesia | Briton faces death penalty for trafficking a kilogram of ecstasy in Bali

A British man is facing the death penalty for allegedly dealing a kilo of MDMA in Bali. Thomas Parker was seen for the first time since his January arrest on Thursday, paraded in front of media in an orange jumpsuit in Denpasar. The 32-year-old could face a firing squad if he is found guilty of trying to push the 1.055kg of Class A drugs police say they recovered in a mail package. MDMA is the main component in the party drug ecstasy. Parker was arrested outside an Airbnb in January, but the case went unreported until authorities showed the Brit shaven and handcuffed at a press conference yesterday.

Todd Willingham: Ex-wife says convicted killer confessed

The former wife of a man whose 2004 execution in Texas has become a source of controversy has said he admitted setting the fire that killed their three daughters during a final prison meeting just weeks before he was put to death, according to a Texas newspaper. Stacy Kuykendall, the ex-wife of Cameron Todd Willingham, said in a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published Sunday that Willingham told her he was upset by threats to divorce him after the new year. The fire that killed the couple's three girls was Dec. 23, 1991. Her last threat to divorce him, she said in a statement, occurred the night before the fire. "He said if I didn't have my girls I couldn't leave him and that I could never have Amber or the twins with anyone else but him," according to the statement from Kuykendall to the newspaper. Willingham went to his death proclaiming his innocence. And over the years, she has offered differing accounts. A Tribune investigation in 2004 showed the...

Iranian dissident risked execution by secretly filming luxurious lifestyle of those connected to the regime

Iranians in Tehran illicitly filmed scenes of their capital for Israeli Channel 12 news, an act that constitutes espionage in Iran and can warrant a death penalty. The clips, broadcast on Saturday, showed locals at high-end shopping malls that the videographers said are only financially accessible to those connected to the regime. “I filmed this video with great difficulty and fear, and I said I would send it to the Israeli Channel 12,” said a 44-year-old Iranian who sent footage for the report and went by the alias Ali, speaking in Persian. “I committed a dangerous act. If you just talk to Israelis, you become a spy and they will execute you.”

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog