On this
date, June 11, 2001, Timothy McVeigh A.K.A as the Oklahoma City
Bomber was executed by lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex in
Terre Haute, Indiana. He was the terrorist who detonated a truck bomb in front
of the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Commonly
referred to as the Oklahoma City Bombing, the attack killed 168
people and injured over 600. It was the deadliest act of terrorism within the
United States prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and
remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in United States history. The
debate of the month will be a debate between the Boston Globe Columnist Jeff
Jacoby and a victim family member, Bud Welch.
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INTERNET
SOURCE:
Death Penalty Debate Heats up at Local College
By: Paul Wiederholt
Updated:
Thu 8:36 AM, Mar 01, 2012
To kill or
not to kill?
That was
the topic of debate tonight at Bridgewater College. Over 450 students gathered
to hear the two sides.
On the pro
side, Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, was speaking in favor of
the death penalty.
On the opposing
side, was Bud Welch, a man whose daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City
bombing over 17 years ago.
"If
you're saying that the worst that could happen to someone who commits a murder
is that he spends time in prison, to me, that's like saying, 'Really, we don't
consider murder to be that terrible.'" said
Jacoby.
Welch, said
that the death penalty is actually difficult for the family members who
suffered from a murder's crime.
"Killing someone is the reverse of that. It actually makes the murder
victim's family member feel re-victimized all over again when the perpetrator
is executed," said Welch.
The event
was part of an ongoing series of debates at Bridgewater College.
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby051501.asp
An
execution, not a lynching
Jewish World Review
May 15, 2001 / 22 Iyar, 5761
http://www.jewishworldreview.com
-- LIKE many other people, Bud
Welch lost a member of his family -- his daughter Julie -- when Timothy McVeigh
bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City.
Unlike most
of the others, Welch opposes the death penalty, even for McVeigh, and is
willing to say so publicly. Predictably, that has brought him a great deal of
media attention. He has been quoted in countless newspaper and magazine stories
and has appeared on television broadcasts nationwide.
In his
view, executions are nothing but organized savagery:
"The
execution of Timothy McVeigh will not bring back Julie or her colleagues,"
Welch says, "nor will it end the grieving for any of the victims of the
Oklahoma City bombing. Revenge and hate are the reasons 168 people died that
day in 1995. I oppose the death penalty absolutely, in all cases, because in
all cases it is an act of revenge and hatred.
But Welch
is wrong. Wrong to describe capital punishment as nothing but "revenge and
hatred" and wrong to imply that revenge and hatred -- as opposed to
fairness and justice -- are what drive those who disagree with him. Welch
deserves our sympathy for his daughter's death, but he is not entitled to impugn
the motives of everyone who supports the death penalty.
Those who
favor McVeigh's execution, after all, include every member of the jury that
decided the bomber should die. Were they, too, in the grip of revenge and
hatred?
Those
jurors, recall, delivered their verdict after 11 hours of deliberation. Before
that, they had spent more than a month at the trial, absorbing the evidence for
and against McVeigh's guilt. They had heard the defense make the strongest
possible case for leniency but were not allowed to hear prosecution testimony
that the judge considered inflammatory. They had become jurors in the first
place only after a vetting process in which they were scrutinized by the
lawyers for signs of bias. The trial itself had been moved to Denver, away from
the Oklahoma press that, in the judge's words, had "demonized"
McVeigh.
Those
precautions, plus innumerable others, make up due process of law, the firewall
that under our system of justice must be interposed between every defendant and
the passion and anger of unbridled vengeance. "The criminal justice system
goes to great lengths to take revenge and hatred out of the legal
process," says Dudley Sharp of Justice For All, a victims advocacy
group.
Which is
not to say that Americans have never carried out executions that really were
acts of revenge and hatred. Over the years, thousands of men, women, and even
children have been publicly killed without due process of law, often in the
presence of hundreds or even thousands of local citizens, because they were
accused of some crime or offense. The word for such executions is lynchings,
and it is hard to imagine anything less like a lynching than the painless,
peaceful death awaiting McVeigh in Terre Haut.
A grim and
heartbreaking volume published last year -- Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America -- shows the horror
that can ensue when self-respecting citizens dispense with due process and take
retribution into their own hands. Image after hellish image attests to the
barbarism of "justice" without law: The pictures in the book -- many
of which, incredibly, were originally printed up as postcards and sold
door-to-door -- show lynching victims hanged, burned alive, dismembered,
riddled with bullets, castrated. They were usually black and usually male --
though not always -- and their killers often took pains to make their deaths as
sadistic as possible.
"When the two Negroes were captured," reported the Vicksburg
Evening Post in its story on the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife
in Doddsville, Miss., "they were tied to trees and ... forced to suffer
the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold out their hands
while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as
souvenirs.... Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of
his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket.... The
most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew
[that] was bored into the flesh of the man and woman ... and then pulled
out."
In the late 19th and early 20th century, two or three black Southerners
were lynched every week. Frequently the killings were well-attended
entertainments. What is most chilling in these photos isn't the dangling and
mutilated corpses of the victims but the cheerful, complacent faces of the
onlookers.
"Neither crazed fiends nor the dregs of white society, the bulk of
the lynchers tended to be ordinary and respectable people," writes historian
Leon Litwak in his introduction to Without Sanctuary. After one lynching near
Charleston, the local newspaper praised the "prominent citizens"
involved for having carried it out in the "most approved and up-to-date
fashion."
Between 1882 and 1948, more than 4,700 black Americans were lynched.
Most were innocent of any crime. All were denied what McVeigh was granted so
amply: fair treatment, due process, an impartial judge and jury, an able
defense, the right to appeal. Their executions were acts of revenge and hate.
His execution will be an act of justice.
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