That's the title of an Atlantic post last month by Andrew Cohen. concerning a new book, Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure, by Indiana University Law prof Jody Madeira. It's published by NYU Press. The book is also available from Amazon.com.
The families of his victims were allowed to watch him die, but in the years that passed, many were left without a sense of finality. A new book follows these people, searching for an answer to a powerful question: When does a tragedy end?
Eleven years ago today-- on June 11, 2001-- Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection at the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana. He died with his eyes open, it was reported, staring up at the closed-circuit camera that was beaming his execution back to Oklahoma. Four years earlier, almost to the day, a federal jury in Denver, Colorado, had sentenced him to death for the murder of 168 people, killed in a truck bomb blast at the Alfred P. Murrah federal building on April 19, 1995.
When the death sentence was revealed on June 13, 1997, The Denver Post reported at the time, there was little of the public cheering that had accompanied the jury's first verdict. Then, there had been a measure of jubilation on the streets outside the courthouse in downtown Denver. This time, on Friday the 13th, there was mostly just a sense of relief. "I'm glad it's complete," juror David Gilger said. "I hope it brings a sense of closure to everyone."
Closure. To many it is just another "made-up word. A politician's word," a word that has proven, unsurprisingly, to be wholly inadequate to describe the range of emotions, often raw and conflicting, of any particular person's grieving process. Then again, many others evidently still swear by it. Search "'victims' rights' and closure" on Google and it comes back with 1,770,000 results.
No surprise. Fifteen years ago, especially, the word had great political relevance. The concept of "victims' rights" was just then broadening its impact upon the criminal justice system, fueled by a United States Supreme Court decision styled Payne v. Tennessee. The 1991 ruling, written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, held that a capital defendant had no Eighth Amendment right to be free from a sentencing trial which included "victim impact" statements.
After Payne came O.J. And then after that came McVeigh. It was in the name of justice, and closure, that the thousands of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing exerted remarkable political power to achieve their goals. The biggest example of their success was the swift, bipartisan passage of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, an extraordinary statute that has influenced hundreds of murder cases -- and much of our legal war on terrorism -- ever since.
NYU Press has more on the book.
In Killing McVeigh, Jody Lyneé Madeira uses the Oklahoma City Bombing as a case study to explore how family members and other survivors come to terms with mass murder. As the fullest case study to date of the Oklahoma City Bombing survivors’ struggle for justice and the first-ever case study of closure, this book describes the profound human and institutional impacts of these labors to demonstrate the importance of understanding what closure really is before naively asserting it can or has been reached.
Related posts are in the books and victims' issues category indexes.
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