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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.
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