Jury Candidate Is ‘Praying’ for McVeigh

A prospective juror intellectually sparred with lawyers Friday and said she’s prayed that Timothy J. McVeigh will find spiritual peace if he did blow up the Oklahoma City federal building.

“I have been praying for Timothy McVeigh for two months,” said the woman, a credit union executive who does work with Roman Catholic churches.

Her statements wrapped up the first week of McVeigh’s trial, in which the Persian Gulf War veteran is charged with murder and conspiracy in the April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people and injured more than 500.

Thirty-one potential jurors underwent often intense questioning by the judge and attorneys. Dozens more likely will be questioned to create the jury pool from which a panel of 12 jurors and six alternates will be selected.

The final prospective juror of the week was among the most articulate. She didn’t hesitate to challenge or criticize the lawyers. At one point, she told an attorney struggling to ask a clear question: “I would say you’re making a tangential statement and not a direct correlation.”

The woman also struck a chord with survivors and families because she said she couldn’t watch television coverage of the bombing every day because it was “too horrible and too horrendous.”

Marsha Kight, whose daughter died in the bombing, said: “That’s my reality. . . . I have to live with it every day.”

The prospective juror said she started praying the day she got her jury summons because “I may be put in the position to voice an opinion of whether he may live or die.”

She said her prayers also related to her hope that if McVeigh is guilty, he will find some peace, as the doomed character did in the film “Dead Man Walking.”

Earlier, a prospective juror broke down in tears as he described his bitterness toward the justice system but said he would still give McVeigh the death penalty if he was convicted.

The man said the system twice dealt him a raw deal, first when he felt his son was wrongly convicted of assault and then when he was charged in a traffic accident after police refused to listen to him.

U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch repeatedly tried to impress upon the man that his own bad experiences should demonstrate why McVeigh deserves an impartial jury. But the man held firm.

“Anybody who takes the innocent life of a child don’t deserve to live,” said the man, who served more than 21 years in the Air Force.

Nearly all of the prospective jurors said they would be able to impose the death penalty, a requirement in federal capital cases.

A prospective juror whose husband lost relatives in the Holocaust was among the few who refused to impose the death penalty.

“I don’t feel I would be able to live with the decision of saying some person should live or die,” she said. “I don’t feel I should have the right to decide that for a person.”