Putting Duty to People Before Popularity

Stephen Jones took one day to decide whether he would take on the most dangerous job of his career: defending the man charged with the Oklahoma City bombing.

On Thursday evening, the 55-year-old Jones, lawyer for Timothy McVeigh, told students at Chapman University School of Law why he took the case in 1995: “He needed a lawyer, and I had a constitutional duty to uphold my oath as a lawyer. I had no conflict of interest in the case, and I had a duty to accept.”

Jones, a former assistant to Richard Nixon and general counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union from 1970-74, had met controversy before, but never anything quite like this.

Other attorneys, he said, had walked away from the case because of threats to their lives. Judge David Russel, who appointed Jones, acknowledged the danger.

“When I told [Russel] that I would take it, he said, ‘Stephen, I hope I haven’t signed your death warrant.’ I said, ‘That makes two of us,’ ” Jones recalled.

Death threats continued throughout the trial, he said. And so did his nightmares. In one, he was assassinated. In another, a yellow Ryder truck, like the one that appeared in front of the Oklahoma City federal building, came to his home with a bomb.

Judgments of his performance as counsel also persisted, as the case was simultaneously “tried in Denver, tried in the media and tried in Congress.” And the press, he said, put him in a no-win situation.

“If I did not appear zealous enough, I was accused of being a toady. If I appeared too zealous I was accused of being insensitive to the victims. . . . But in the end I had to work to protect his life and do it with a fire in my belly.”

McVeigh was convicted of 11 federal counts of murder and conspiracy.

Jones told the law students he hoped “that none of you will have the responsibility that I had. I hope that never again we will have a case where an American is charged with the deaths of 168 other Americans.”