Timothy mcveigh execution process
•
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,
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 , 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 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 satellit
•
Even many of the most vociferous opponents of capital punishment were subdued in their protests when Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was put to death in the early hours of 11 June in Terre Haute, Indiana. The execution, which was the first federal application of the death penalty in the United States for 38 years, was carried out painlessly and aseptically with an injection of sodium thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride. It was the culmination of a drawn out process that cost more than $15m (£m) in legal fees and received the maximum amount of media coverage and hype. Videotaping the execution was forbidden, but some survivors or relatives of the victims watched in person or on closed circuit television.
Although many people oppose capital punishment, repeated polls indicate that at least 65% of Americans are in favour of it. There was even greater support for the execution of Timothy McVeigh. The Chicago Tribune, among others, argued that such exec
•
‘He died with his eyes open’: Covering the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh
The authorities had been preparing for thousands of protesters, both for and against the death penalty. As it was, just a couple of hundred showed up.
Those that did were far outnumbered by the media. Up to 1, reporters had gathered on the thick grass outside of Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary to cover the execution of Timothy McVeigh, both America’s deadliest domestic terrorist with white supremacist sympathies, and also an ordinary-looking veteran of the Gulf War, and a Roman Catholic born in upstate New York.
In April , with help of accomplice of Terry Nichols, a friend from army training, the disillusioned McVeigh had driven a truck bomb beneath the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and lit a two-minute fuse before fleeing the scene in a second vehicle he had parked nearby.
The truck, a Ford F rental vehicle, contained 4,lbs of explosives and it destroyed almost all