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Timothy Mcveigh Case Summary

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Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1995 killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more in the blast. He was convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. District Court in Denver, Colorado.
McVeigh appealed his conviction and sentence for many reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason for his appeal was to avoid the death penalty. He said that the pre-trial publicity was unfairly caused prejudice toward him and juror misconduct prohibited his right to a fair trial and sentence. He also believed the court did not allow proper vior dire by selecting a bias jury to sentence him and there were some other places in the case he claimed to prove the case was biased. This means that he thought the district court had abused its discretion during this trial. He argues for a stay-of-execution which means to delay his execution.
There was a problem though with proving that publicity before the trial caused unfair justice during the trial. The Court ruled that the defendant “must establish that an irrepressibly hostile attitude pervaded the community.” McVeigh had was certainly known because of the media covering the bombing, but there was no sign of communities being hostile enough to influence the outcome of the trial. The Court stated “the mere fact of unfavorable …show more content…

The district court took the necessary time and caution to inform all possible jurors to ignore the publicity surrounding the issues of the case. McVeigh never argued that the district court failed to take actions to ensure fairness in the jury. He interestingly said the court focused so much on making sure the jurors did not pay attention to publicity that jurors eventually saw the publicity of the case due to strong pressure from the court not to. This statement was implying the jurors had no mind to let the publicity influence their decisions of the case until the court reminded them not

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