BY DANI BARLEY
HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania — The headline on the front page read in big bold letters, "8.14 am. It was over". The US federal government has executed Timothy McVeigh, the man who committed the worst act of terrorism on US soil. According to President George W Bush, notorious for executing 152 people in six years while governor of Texas, "The victims of the Oklahoma City bombing have been given not vengeance, but justice".
But was executing the most hated man in the country really an act of justice?
The US and Japan are the only Western countries that still practice capital punishment.
In the US, support for the death penalty is at a 20-year low (approximately 55% favour capital punishment, according to the most recent poll). The debate over whether or not the death penalty is constitutional has been rekindled in recent years.
Many question the fairness of who receives a death sentence, citing the overwhelming disproportion of minorities on death row. Others point to cases where new scientific methods, especially DNA analysis, have proved that many awaiting execution were in fact innocent.
Adding fire to the debate is whether the execution of the mentally handicapped violates the eighth amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment". In President Bush's native Texas alone, six mentally handicapped people have been executed since 1976, with another seven currently on death row.
In Arizona, a schizophrenic man who has the mind of an 8-year-old sits on death row because he cannot pass a psychological exam clearing him for execution. Prosecutors are currently searching for a psychologist who will treat him so that he can be cleared for execution.
The debate over capital punishment is becoming more evenly split around the country — except in the case of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Oklahoma City is in the heartland of the country and, while the death of 168 people is a horrific thing to imagine anywhere, the choice of location adds salt to the wound. The words "Oklahoma City" and "bomb" simply do not belong in the same sentence.
Then came the images from the site. Most people will remember, and not soon forget, the image of a firefighter cradling a dying infant in his arms.
When US citizens received their first glimpse of the person who committed this act, we were all in shock. It was not some stereotypical image of a terrorist, but a "home-grown" boy.
I was in grade five at elementary school at the time and our teachers tried to explain to us what had happened. When asked what we thought should happen to Timothy McVeigh, my class replied simply, "We should kill him".
And that was the majority sentiment in this country, especially after McVeigh revealed that he considered the children who died were simply "collateral damage" to his right-wing anti-government cause. "Collateral damage" was a term he learned from the US State Department, used to justify the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis during the Gulf War, a war McVeigh fought in.
For Bush and for backers of the death penalty around the country, McVeigh was a god-send, the poster boy for lethal injection, someone who deserved to be hated.
"We need the death penalty for people like McVeigh", they could claim, thereby hiding the fact that those executed are nearly always the poor, the downtrodden, the racially oppressed, and that the threat of the electric chair or the gas chamber or the chemical cocktail is used to keep them in their "proper" place.
But not everyone is this country believed McVeigh should be put to death at the hands of the federal government.
Bud Welch, a man who lost his daughter on April 19, was outspoken on why McVeigh should be kept in his prison cell for the rest of his life. He said that killing McVeigh will not bring back his daughter Julie or any of the others and that McVeigh himself considered the execution to be a state-assisted suicide, a way of avoiding coming to grips with what he had done.
May 16 came and went without any execution, for the FBI revealed just days before that they had neglected to turn over 4,000 pages of material to McVeigh's defence team. A new date was set and the nation sat in waiting — with the death penalty debate heating up immensely.
June 11, 2001. Every news channel and morning talk show was dedicated to the execution. That morning I was awake and I could not escape the coverage, so I started watching it.
Every detail about what was to happen had been revealed, from his final 24 hours to what effect each chemical will have on his body. I watched with horror the chilling way the reporters matter of factly went about detailing the "business of the execution" and interviewed anyone who would bring forth another reason to justify the killing of another human being.
It was here that I learned Timothy McVeigh's death certificate would read "Cause of death: Lethal Injection. Manner of death: Homicide". Indiana state laws stipulate that the killing of one person by another is homicide and must read so on the death certificate.
8.28 am. It is announced that the Oklahoma City bomber is dead. While it is illegal to tape or broadcast an execution, a closed circuit feed was sent to Oklahoma City so that those who "qualified" could watch it.
One by one, the media witnesses make a statement about what they witnessed. For the rest of the day the news channels stayed with the story, reciting over and over every imaginable detail.
The most hated man in the United States was dead and now we could all move on with our lives, right? Nevertheless, Bud Welch was right, this death did not bring back any of the deceased and did not heal the scars for those involved.
As one man put it, "What have we accomplished by executing Timothy McVeigh now that there are 169 people dead?"
Those at the memorial in Oklahoma City stayed silent when the announcement came that McVeigh was dead. Death penalty supporters, on the other hand, counted down the time when the execution was to take place as if it was New Year's Eve.
We are the land of the free, of the brave, and allegedly a leader in the humane treatment of people, but we justify death with more death. As a "regular Joe" stated in a local paper, "When a society kills its killers, then we become a little bit more like them."