Word: matsch
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...allowed to call victims and their relatives to share their grief during the sentencing phase of trials, to make the victim as real and present in the courtroom as the killer is. In the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, however, U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch asserted the right to bar any victim testimony that was too emotionally loaded: "The penalty phase hearing here cannot be turned into some type of a lynching," he said...
...McVeigh's latest battle with the Federal Government is, for him at least, a win-win proposition. Last week lawyers for the Oklahoma City bomber asked federal judge Richard P. Matsch to stay McVeigh's execution, which was postponed from May 16 until June 11 after the FBI admitted it had misplaced more than 4,000 pages of documents that should have been given to McVeigh's defense team. Arguing that the government had perpetrated "a fraud on the court," the lawyers requested a hearing to determine whether the feds willfully withheld the documents in order to conceal exculpatory evidence...
Among the facts lawyers want Judge Matsch to consider are witness reports that resurrect nagging questions about whether a larger conspiracy led to the April 1995 bombing that took 168 lives. One of the documents, for instance, summarizes a call received by the FBI from Morris John Kuper Jr., who told investigators to check out activities in a parking lot a block away from the Murrah Federal Building about an hour before it was blown apart. Kuper later testified that he had seen a man resembling McVeigh walking with a dark-haired, muscular companion--a description that matches those...
...truck and other vehicles, including one containing fertilizer, like the one used for the bomb, at Geary Lake in Kansas the day before the bombing helped save Nichols from the death penalty, because jurors couldn't be certain that someone else wasn't involved. That matters because--as Judge Matsch reminded the government before the 1997 McVeigh trial, over which the jurist presided--"nonprosecution of equally culpable participants" may be a mitigating factor that helps a defendant avoid capital punishment. "Anything tending to show involvement of persons other than or in addition to Timothy McVeigh may be material...
...Matsch's judgment was met with praise - Attorney General John Ashcroft called Matsch?s decision "a ruling for justice" - and with criticism - McVeigh attorney Robert Nigh expressed "extreme disappointment - and the Appeals Court's decision was met with more of the same. In Terre Haute, Indiana, where McVeigh is scheduled to die Monday, the rush of rulings prompted a rush of preparations, as restaurateurs and motel owners scrambled to get ready for the onslaught of media and curiosity seekers expected to descend upon the city over the next few days...