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Updated May 24, 2001, 12:40 p.m. ET
Ashcroft: all documents handed over, no more delays

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General John Ashcroft said Thursday that federal officials have given Timothy McVeigh's lawyers all previously missing documents in the Oklahoma City bombing case. He said he will not further postpone McVeigh's June 11 execution.

Ashcroft said a worldwide search for documents, ordered in the wake of the FBI's disclosure that it failed to produce some 3,000 pages at the time of McVeigh's trial, turned up some 900 additional documents.

But the attorney general emphasized that the documents produced belatedly represented "less than 1 percent" of the hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence in the case.

"No documents created any doubt about his guilt, let alone established his innocence," Ashcroft told a Justice Department news conference.

Ashcroft said that on Thursday, the Justice Department and FBI had completed a "comprehensive effort" to identify all documents still missing and relevant to the case.

He said he was making public the results of an internal review of the documents but could not release them because of a protective order imposed by a federal court in Colorado.

Ashcroft also said, "We're talking about a relatively small amount of information," and briefly described the nature of some of the missing documents. One involved a letter written to federal authorities by a man offering information while demanding money and the release of a federal prisoner.

In other instances, he said, the missing documents were newspaper and magazine clippings sent in by "a person under psychiatric care," and letters representing offers by psychics to help.

The bureau acknowledged on May 10 that it had failed to produce thousands of pages of evidence documents to McVeigh's lawyers at the time of his trial in 1997.

McVeigh was convicted in connection with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and sentenced to death in the terrorist attack that killed 168 people, including 19 children.

He was to have been executed on May 11 — the day after the FBI publicly conceded the paperwork foul-up.

The agency came under heavy criticism, and FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted to congressional committees that it had been a "serious error." He blamed the problem on poor communications between the headquarters office here and the FBI field office in Oklahoma City, which had been assigned the job of pulling the documents together for archiving.

The documents were supposed to have been handed over to the defense before McVeigh's trial. The FBI says they were withheld because of computer and record-keeping blunders at the agency's field offices.

Nathan Chambers, McVeigh's lawyer, said he received several hundred new pages Wednesday in addition to 600 to 700 pages in the previous several days.

McVeigh's lawyers already have been looking over 3,135 pages that federal prosecutors turned over earlier this month after the FBI first disclosed that it had found documents as it was gathering investigative files for archiving purposes.

McVeigh is said to be weighing his options and considering whether the newly disclosed document provide an avenue for him to seek to delay his execution and contest his sentence.

Chambers declined to say whether he would seek more time to go over the new information. "We have several options under consideration," he said.

For more than a week, McVeigh's lawyers have been poring over documents, even as the FBI has turned up additional materials and forwarded it.

McVeigh's lawyers have met with him at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., where he was to have been put to death by lethal injection.

Ashcroft had said on May 11 that law enforcement officials believed nothing in the evidence would alter the guilty verdict but stressed that more time had to be allotted his attorneys to go through the material.

 
Special report: Execution of an American Terrorist
 
  • Profile of a mass murderer: Who is Tim McVeigh?

  • A video tour of the execution chamber

  • Interactive map of the execution facility

  • Full execution coverage
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  • Interactive road map
  • Full journey coverage
  • View photo gallery
  •  
     
  • Listen to audio of the explosion, recorded from across the street

  • Diagram of Alfred P. Murrah building and vicinity

  • The Crime Library: Full story of the bombing

  • Full bombing coverage
  •  
     
  • Victims remembered with 168 seconds of silence

  • Profiles of all 168 victims
  •  
     
  • Video report on the motives behind McVeigh's actions.

  • Watch more video
  •  
     
  • Read McVeigh's petition for a stay of execution

  • Read prosecutors' brief opposing stay

  • More documents
  •  
     
  • Transcript of chat with Court TV's Tim Sullivan, who discusses the execution of Timothy McVeigh

  • Transcript of chat with Paul Heath, a bombing survivor, who discusses what it was like that day and his recovery

  • Full archive of chats
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