Prosecutors Urge Jury to Give Death Penalty to Nichols

In a courtroom heavy with sorrow, lawyers opened the second stage of the Oklahoma City bombing case against Terry L. Nichols on Monday--with the government demanding that he join Timothy J. McVeigh on death row and the defense imploring the jury to spare the life of “Terry Nichols, the human being.”

Neither side held back in arguing how they believe Nichols should be punished for collaborating in the worst act of terrorism in America. The stakes for Nichols: either death or life in prison with no hope of release.

The jury that must make that decision is the same one that struggled for six days before reaching what seemed to be a compromise verdict about Nichols’ role in the bombing.

Pat Ryan, the U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City, said the government will present 60 witnesses over the next three days to dramatize not only the horror of April 19, 1995, but also the suffering the victims and their families endure.

The government’s first witnesses Monday were a woman who lost a son in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building’s day-care center, a police officer who still anguishes over his inability to save others, and a man who brought the courtroom to tears when he described living childless for 37 years with one woman, the two of them making a life by singing in the church choir and teaching Sunday school.

When prosecutors displayed a photograph of Leora Lee Sells, a Housing and Urban Development employee killed in the explosion, her husband, Roy Sells, responded with simple grace. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s my beautiful wife.”

Lead defense lawyer Michael Tigar told the jurors that in the midst of such heartbreaking stories, they must not close their minds to his 42-year-old client.

He told them that Nichols’ role in the bombing was peripheral at best, that others with more responsibility remain unpunished. He promised that when the defense puts on its case in this sentencing phase, it will show a fresh side of Nichols--one of a father in prison kept away from his children and unable to help raise them.

While several jurors cried openly at the victims’ tales, Tigar’s description of Nichols reaching out from jail to his children prompted Nichols’ eyes, normally unemotional during his trial, to tear over.

“It was one year after his arrest before he was even permitted to touch his children,” Tigar said.

McVeigh went on trial first, and in June a jury found him guilty on all 11 counts against him and sentenced him to death for being the mastermind of the bombing.

But the Nichols jury is decidedly different. This panel of seven women and five men deliberated for 41 hours before reaching a mixed verdict Dec. 23.

It found Nichols guilty of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, a fertilizer bomb inside a rented truck, and determined he knew the explosion would cause deaths--the blast killed 168 people and injured more than 500.

But the jury acquitted Nichols on two counts of actually using the weapon and destroying the building, and found him guilty only of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of eight federal law enforcement officers.

The guilty verdict on the first conspiracy count carries the possible death sentence, and it was there that both sides set out Monday to win the jury’s confidence.

Ryan began his opening statement by recalling Helena Garrett, who testified in both the McVeigh and Nichols trials about her anguish in hearing the bomb across the street and her attempts to rescue her 16-month-old son, Tevin, from the America’s Kids day-care complex on the second floor of the Murrah building.

Tevin turned out to be one of the 19 children killed that morning.

“This,” Ryan said, “is but one story of 168 stories.”

Ryan said prosecutors in this penalty phase will stress that Nichols invested “substantial planning and premeditation” in the bombing, and then stayed at home in Kansas when he knew what devastation was coming.

Ryan spoke for an hour; Tigar addressed the jury for the next 30 minutes.

He began by urging the jurors not to “sign a paper” that sets in motion “some morning or some afternoon when they take Terry Nichols out to kill him.”

Tigar reiterated his charge that others were more heavily involved with McVeigh. He mentioned Michael Fortier, the government’s chief witness, who testified that he knew of the bombing and helped transport stolen guns with McVeigh and cased the Murrah building. “Others who are equally culpable will not be punished with death,” Tigar said.

The first victim to testify was Laura Kennedy, who worked in the third-floor Health and Human Services office and whose 18-month-old son, Blake, was killed in the day-care center below her.

She suffered slight injuries, and three days after the bombing was notified that rescue workers had found Blake’s body. She is doubtful about having more children.

Jerry Flowers, a 24-year Oklahoma City police officer, described searching through the debris for victims. He found a woman embedded in a wall, another with her head barely above rising water. He helped recover the bodies of a baby girl whose feet had been blown off and a 6-year-old boy who was decapitated.

Digging through rubble, he said, he found a woman who “had been broken in half. Her head and her feet were laying side by side.”

Later that day he stopped at the house of a neighbor who had lost his wife in the explosion. Covered in a dirty, blood-smeared police uniform, he told his neighbor that he had not recovered her body.

“He put his hands around me and I apologized,” Flowers said, crying on the witness stand. “I said I did everything I could.

“He held me and he said it was OK, and then I went home.”