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Stuart Revercomb

Stuart Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.

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May 24, 2001

Trying to Forgive Timothy McVeigh

All competency issues of the Federal Bureau of Investigation aside, it won't be long before Timothy McVeigh is strapped onto a stretcher in Terre Haute Indiana. There in the confines of a sterile 10 foot by 20 foot room of light green tile, McVeigh will be injected with a series of drugs to render him "biologically insufficient for maintaining life".

As dictated by "Indiana State Protocol On Execution By Lethal Injection", it goes something like this :

After clearances have been received from the Governor and the Attorney General, the condemned offender is escorted by five correctional officers from a holding cell to the execution chamber next door, where he is placed on a gurney and secured by leather straps located at the wrists, biceps, chest, stomach, and legs. The offender is not masked or hooded during the execution. The offender is permitted head movement so that he may turn his head to face witnesses (the media, his family, and the victim's family) when making a final statement.

Before any witnesses are brought into the execution facility, the microphone and speakers in each witness room are tested and the intravenous (IV) tubes are set up. Two administration sets are used, one for each arm. The line for the right arm is held in reserve as a contingency line in case of a malfunction or blockage in the first line. A flow of normal saline is begun. IV preparation is done by the injection team.

Witnesses are escorted into the witness room. The warden asks the offender if he has any last statement. Then, the procedure is initiated. The prisoner is given a sequence of three drugs using a manual process (instead of an injection machine). First, a lethal dose of sodium thiopental is administered which is supposed to initially render the offender unconscious. This takes approximately 30 seconds. After a saline flush, pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, is administered to collapse the offender's diaphragm and lungs. This takes approximately 45 seconds. After a second saline flush, potassium chloride is administered to stop the offender's heart. This takes approximately 30 seconds. The administration of drugs takes less than two minutes.

Several minutes after the last signs of life are evident, the warden asks the physician to be brought in to pronounce death. The estimated average length of time that elapses from the time that the offender is restrained until the time that death is determined is 17 minutes.

Pretty clean and quick if you ask me. While it takes the State of Indiana 17 minutes to write off on the job, it sounds like Timothy McVeigh will be out of his misery and ours in just under a minute. And by the tenor of the coverage surrounding McVeigh's execution most Americans will be pretty darn satisfied when those 60 seconds have passed.

But I am no longer one of them.

I certainly used to be. It wasn't long ago that I was more of an "eye for an eye" kind of guy than not, and if you had told me that some revved up militant, anti-American, ex-marine had been tried and found guilty of setting off a bomb that would take the lives of 168 innocent men, women and children, I would have said fry the guy and the sooner the better.

And if you had informed me he would later refer to the 19 children he murdered as "collateral damage", I'd have thrown the switch myself. Gladly.

But now I'm not so sure. Maybe its because the taking of McVeigh's life can never truly bring justice in any real sense. Can 1 life be traded for 168? Can it even begin to account for or ease the unimaginable pain of the thousands of friends and family that have endured and continue to endure the loss of their loved ones? It would seem not. If we're honest with ourselves we know that the justice we long and hope for is no longer really possible.

Another problem I have with executing even McVeigh and maybe especially McVeigh, is that in our haste to "make him go away", we are giving up on the possibility that he may one day understand the overwhelming nature of his actions. It is somehow intuitive. There is something about sending a cold blooded killer to his death fully cold blooded and unremorseful, that seems supremely hollow and devoid of meaning. Kind of like spanking an infant who has no understanding of the inappropriateness of his actions.

I want Timothy McVeigh to feel the weight of his crime. Not to make him the martyr in his own mind that he seeks to be. If I had lost a family member in this tragedy I think I would rather begin a process that might start with Tim McVeigh residing in a room with plexiglass covered walls made up of nothing but 5x7 pictures and the names of his victims - the "collateral damage" that he now so easily sweeps beneath his emotionless mental carpet. My guess is that one day the names and faces of all those victims might crack the thin shell behind which he now hides, and perhaps he too would know something of the suffering and anguish he has caused so many.

And perhaps somewhere in the midst of the worst of it, Tim McVeigh might himself become a "new creation". Yes even McVeigh, certainly one of the most despised individuals since Judas Iscariot, will be / is given that offer. And even if the evil in McVeigh is never overcome, there is something in the trying that has the potential to take away far more pain than an execution.

It has been said that Judas' greatest sin was not the act of turning Christ over to the High Priests, but rather his inability to understand that even his actions were not beyond the ultimate forgiveness of God. So he took his own life, and the rest as they say is history.

And if we take McVeigh's, the history we write already seems in some way darker - that somehow we too have trusted God less with the ultimate outcome.

And there's not a lot of peace or healing in that.