The Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, went to his maker yesterday, hurried on his way by a cocktail of lethal drugs squeezed into his leg, his last seconds observed in grim detail by dozens of his victims' relatives and United States government officials. In deploring the manner of his death, it is not possible to set aside the terrible crime for which he was rightly convicted. A total of 168 people died and another 500 were injured in the truck-bomb attack on the Alfred P Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. The death toll included 17 children. It is perhaps ironic that McVeigh was put to death a few days after the people of this State voted to remove provision for the death penalty from our Constitution and to forbid the Oireachtas from enacting legislation to restore it. The contrast with the US could not be starker - over 3,500 people are on death row; 33 people have been executed so far this year; 85 people were put to death last year; 98 the year before (the highest number since the early 1950s) and at least nine more prisoners are scheduled to follow McVeigh before this month is out. Since the Supreme Court ruling of 1976 that ushered in the current era of US executions, 35 people officially classified as mentally retarded have also been executed.
Despite the bulk of evidence which suggests that the threat of capital punishment does not deter, most Americans seem incapable of ending their love affair with executions. And this despite ground-breaking research in Illinois, in January 1999, which all but proved that several people executed there were probably innocent, provoking at least some pause and soul searching. Because Timothy McVeigh's crime was against federal employees and a federal building, he was tried and convicted by federal courts. While the case against him was initiated by the Clinton administration, it is somehow grimly appropriate that the new administration of George Bush carried out the execution. Between 1982 and last year, Texas, the State of which Mr Bush was governor, executed 246 people, far more than any other State. There was never any doubt that Mr Bush would allow the first federal execution for 38 years. It is a sad commentary that a country which for so many was, and remains, a beacon of hope and promise, a defender of democracy and a respecter of freedom, should continue to promote a process of retribution - not justice - which the rest of the civilised world has come to accept neither works nor is morally right.