Shifty? They Think It's Nifty

By Rick Horowitz

Why People Hate Lawyers, Chapter 199... I'm just guessing here, but you were probably under the impression that the Oklahoma City bombing trial was about a bombing in Oklahoma City. There was, after all, all that testimony from Oklahoma City witnesses and survivors, not to mention relatives of those who never made it out alive. There were all those pictures of the Oklahoma City bomb site: the caved-in front, the pancaked floors.

So now you're wondering: If it was about a bombing in Oklahoma City, what were they doing talking about a fire in Waco? One devastated building wasn't enough for one trial?

Guess again. And thank Timothy McVeigh's lawyers.

For hour after hour in the "penalty phase," McVeigh's lawyers tried to slide the jury's attention away from the Murrah Federal Building, and a few hundred miles south toward the Branch Davidian compound.

Let's roll the videotape, the lawyers said, and there was the siege all over again, and then the assault, and then the blaze. Here are all these articles from "Soldier of Fortune" magazine, the lawyers said; see how terrible the federal government was?

And this mattered...why?

That's the beauty part. Actually, that's the fuzzy part. Until the final moments of the trial, McVeigh's lawyers didn't quite say why it mattered. They dangled it out there. They danced right up to the line with it -- but only up to the line.

"This is not a trial about Waco," McVeigh's lawyers had insisted to the jury as the penalty phase began. "It is a trial in part about what Mr. McVeigh thought happened at Waco, because what we think happens constructs reality for each of us."

What McVeigh thought happened at Waco, his lawyers said, was that the federal government had "declared war on the American people," had murdered innocents and children.

And this mattered...why?

They had the hardest time saying it. But it could only matter for one purpose: motive. The Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh's lawyers were suggesting, was an angry man's payback for what the government supposedly did at Waco. Call it revenge. Call it frontier justice. But there were reasons for it.

"He is at the middle of this," McVeigh's lawyers declared, without saying precisely how, "and there is violence at both ends."

But hang on a minute: It's only about reasons, about what McVeigh thought happened at Waco, if McVeigh acted on those thoughts. If McVeigh did it. But weren't these the very same lawyers who had been claiming all along that McVeigh didn't do it? That somebody else -- some unknown conspirator, some unmatched leg -- was responsible for so much death and destruction?

And suddenly they were saying...what? We're not (quite) admitting he did it, but here's why he did it? Very cute.

Now, of course, you're wondering: If they knew then what they seem to know now, how could they have said what they said then? How could they have put everyone through those months of preparation, those weeks of tearful testimony from dozens of witnesses, if they already grasped the story behind the story?

Because they're his lawyers, that's why -- and lawyers have reasons, too. First time around, they were trying to get the guy off. Second time around, they were just trying to save his neck. So what if the two approaches were totally contradictory? Someone else can worry about that.

And lawyers wonder why people hate lawyers....

 6/13/97