01/06/01

U.S. Will Oppose Any Request to Delay McVeigh Execution

By DAVID JOHNSTON with JO THOMASWASHINGTON, May 30 - Attorney General John Ashcroft said today thatthe Justice Department would oppose any effort by lawyers forTimothy J. McVeigh to postpone his execution because of theF.B.I.'s belated discovery of documents concerning the OklahomaCity bombing."Because these documents cast no doubt on the surety of his guilt,the Justice Department will vigorously oppose any attempt tofurther delay the imposition of the sentence," Mr. Ashcroft said ina statement. Meanwhile, a lawyer seeking a new sentencing hearing for MichaelJ. Fortier, a key witness in the bombing trial, has told a federalappellate court that federal prosecutors lied in an effort to win aharsher sentence for his client.Lawyers for Mr. McVeigh are to meet with him at the federal prisonin Terre Haute, Ind., where he is scheduled to be executed on June11, and have said they could decide as early as Thursday whether toseek a further postponement. Mr. McVeigh was sentenced to death for the 1995 bombing of theAlfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed168 people and injured scores of others. He was initially scheduled to die by lethal injection on May 16.But Mr. Ashcroft postponed the execution after F.B.I. agents foundmore than 4,000 pages of documents that should have been turnedover to the McVeigh lawyers, including interview reports from theinvestigation.In his statement today, Mr. Ashcroft, who is traveling in theNetherlands, said, "A jury determined that the death penalty is theappropriate punishment for McVeigh, and failure to carry out thatsentence would deny justice for the victims and for the Americanpeople."Meanwhile, Mr. Fortier's lawyer, Michael G. McGuire of Tulsa,argued in a petition accompanying a filing to the United StatesCourt of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, that prosecutors"sold the truth" for political gain when they said Mr. Fortier knewthat money from a robbery would be used to finance the bombing. Mr. Fortier, who is in prison after pleading guilty to failing towarn officials of the bombing plot, has said that he knew inadvance about the bombing and that he helped Mr. McVeigh sellstolen weapons, hid evidence and lied to F.B.I. agents. In 1998,Judge G. Thomas Van Bebber of the Federal District Court inOklahoma City sentenced Mr. Fortier to 12 years in prison.At that sentencing, Sean Connelly, the prosecutor, said Mr.Fortier's wife, Lori, had testified that Mr. McVeigh told her heintended to rob an Arkansas gun dealer to raise money for thebombing. In a second hearing, granted to correct sentencing-guidelineerrors, prosecutors gave the same account of Mrs. Fortier'stestimony. In March, a three-judge appellate panel rejected Mr. Fortier'schallenges to the fairness of the proceedings at his secondsentencing. He asked the court to rehear his request. In a May 15 brief objecting to another hearing, prosecutorsacknowledged that there was no evidence Mr. Fortier was presentwhen Mr. McVeigh made the statement to Mrs. Fortier, and that ithad no evidence anyone else told Mr. Fortier the purpose of therobbery. "It does not follow, however, that Fortier could notreasonably have foreseen the connection," prosecutors wrote. Mr. McGuire disagreed. "Instead of truthfully representing thefacts which would influence Fortier's sentencing guideline range,"he told the court, "the United States attorney actively obfuscatedand attempted to conceal the truth." In a response filed today, Mr. Connelly said Mrs. Fortier'stestimony could have been read two ways. Mr. McVeigh might havediscussed the reasons for the robbery during a talk that includedher husband, or he might have told her the next day, when Mr.Fortier was not present. Mr. Connelly said it did not matter. Given the "two possiblereadings," he said, "we do not seek to retract our concession thatMichael Fortier was not present for the `fund-raiser' conversation.That concession, however, should not be used by Fortier as proofthat the government deliberately misrepresented facts at any priorstage."