Justice, Even for the Worst

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft did his job Friday when he stayed the execution of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Ashcroft is sworn to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees that defendants receive a fair trial.

With the revelation Thursday by federal law enforcement officials that 3,000 pages of material the FBI gathered had been mislaid during the 1997 bombing trial--materials McVeigh’s defense attorneys should have seen--Ashcroft had no choice but to order the stay.

The execution of McVeigh, who had waived his rights to appeal his death sentence for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, was rescheduled to June 11.

In the interim, Ashcroft will no doubt be scrutinizing the agency whose sloppy work put him in this awkward position.

For decades, under the authoritarian rule of its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was largely able to hide or obscure its failures and errors. More intense congressional oversight and media scrutiny of the bureau in the three decades since Hoover’s death has brought its blunders into clearer view.

FBI investigations have publicly identified suspects in high-profile cases against whom it could make no case. On the shakiest of suspicions, agents hounded security guard Richard Jewell as the prime suspect in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case. Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee was the focus and eventually the victim of a badly botched spying investigation. The FBI has been widely assailed for the mess it made at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in which 80 people were killed, and in its handling of a confrontation with white separatists in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

The Justice Department’s own investigation found that the bureau’s vaunted crime laboratory work had produced flawed data and inaccurate testimony in a number of major cases.

Most notoriously, the FBI for years failed to detect the alleged espionage for Moscow carried out by Robert Philip Hanssen, a trusted high-level official.

In this latest mishap, the missing materials surfaced after an FBI archivist requested that all data related to the case be sent to the Oklahoma City office for archiving.

The precise nature of the documents uncovered is not yet clear. Whatever their contents, there’s little indication that this material will be grounds to overturn McVeigh’s conviction.

But as Ashcroft stated at a news conference Friday, “evenhandedness and dispassionate evaluation of the evidence and the facts ... are essential to protecting the constitutional rights of every citizen and to sustaining public confidence in the administration of justice.” This is never more important than when the government is prepared to impose the death penalty.

We are judged as a nation not just by how we treat the best among us, but how we treat the worst. At the same time, as the attorney general acknowledged, his duty far transcends the imperatives of this horrific case.

“It is my responsibility,” he said, “to promote the sanctity of the rule of law ... and to protect the integrity of our system of justice.”

Every defendant, in every case, requires nothing less. And the attorney general requires an FBI that can shoot straight.